FactSet, a global financial digital platform and enterprise solutions provider, has partnered with Chicago-based creative agency VSA Partners to unveil a second round of spots in its “Not Just the Facts” campaign. The campaign originally launched in April this year with impressive results.
The campaign was built on a core strategic insight: While quality data is critical for financial professionals, facts in isolation provide little value. FactSet’s personalization, data connectivity, open and flexible technology, and dedicated service and support provide the context necessary for the investment community to turn facts into valuable insights—and make the most of them.
The new creative picks up where the previous left off. This time it focuses on a particularly boorish office worker, drolly played by character actor Wyndham Maxwell, who ticks off an encyclopedic list of facts and non sequiturs during business meetings and in an elevator to the bemusement of his colleagues.
The tongue-in-cheek campaign, which plays more like a perfect-pitch comedy series than a typical B2B commercial effort, is unlike anything else in the financial services industry—both in its use of humor and in its humanistic approach. Starting this week, FactSet will roll out 16 unique spots—a combination of :30s, :15s, :06s and nine “shorts”—across multiple channels including digital, streaming and CTV.
“We are thrilled with the success of our bold ‘Not Just the Facts’ campaign, which emphasizes what sets the FactSet brand apart: not just the breadth and depth of our data offering, but the intelligent solutions and advanced technology that contextualize it for global finance professionals,” said Jenifer Brooks, Chief Marketing Officer at FactSet. “We’re proud of how the campaign’s direct and relatable tone, which challenges industry norms, has resonated with audiences. As we look toward this next phase of the campaign, we will continue to bring fresh perspectives and empathetic storytelling to demonstrate the value of our offerings.”
The first round of the “Not Just the Facts” campaign earlier this year achieved outstanding results, resonating deeply and driving significant engagement. The spots achieved 193 million impressions with a 98% increase in click-through rates and a 36% rise in video view-through rates across the campaign platform.
“Humor is an incredible way to connect with audiences—and the results we saw in round one of the campaign confirm it,” said Kim Mickenberg, Associate Partner and Executive Creative Director at VSA. “In ‘Not Just the Facts,’ we’ve built a platform that lets us entertain and engage our audiences while telling a really clear, compelling story about what makes FactSet so different. We’re so proud of the work and all the collaboration that went into it.”
Los Angeles–based Docter Twins Matthew and Jason Docter directed the original campaign and this new work through their production company, Thinking Machine. The identical twin brothers grew up in the Midwest and were heavily influenced by classic comedy directors like the Coen brothers and John Hughes. Their work is known for a subtle sensibility that balances smart performance and cinematic style with a witty flair for storytelling.
“It’s tough to choose a favorite line when working with the amazing team at VSA,” said the Docter Twins. “Two of our favorites from this go-round are “‘Trees can recognize their siblings’ and ‘Some dinosaurs had really tiny arms…and could probably only bench press like 400 lbs.’
“VSA’s Kim [Mickenberg], Megan [Schulist, creative director], and Bryan [Haney, motion producer] are never short on ideas.
“And with a client like [global head of brand] Christina Sradj and others at FactSet willing to let us riff, the actors find a playful space and never let up. They were best friends by the end of the shoot, which sums up the fun we all had working together.”
FactSet (NYSE: FDS) helps the financial community to see more, think bigger, and work better. Our digital platform and enterprise solutions deliver financial data, analytics, and open technology to nearly 8,000 global clients, including over 206,000 individual users. Clients across the buy side and sell side as well as wealth managers, private equity firms, and corporations achieve more every day with our comprehensive and connected content, flexible next-generation workflow solutions, and client-centric specialized support. As a member of the S&P 500, we are committed to sustainable growth and have been recognized as one of the Best Places to Work in 2023 by Glassdoor as a Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Award winner. Learn more and follow us on X and LinkedIn.
VSA’s purpose is to design for a better human experience. As a strategy and creative agency, we blend consumer insights and data with human-centered design to activate meaningful, motivating and measurable experiences in an increasingly noisy world. With offices in Chicago and New York, VSA offers a full range of integrated capabilities—branding, advertising, data science and technology—all under one roof. VSA is also a proud member of Meet The People, an international family of unified and independent agencies. For more than 40 years, we have delivered solutions for business and creative leaders at some of the world’s most respected brands and forward-thinking organizations, including Google, Nike and IBM.
Thinking Machine is a Los Angeles–based commercial production company specializing in creative storytelling.
Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves.”
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Call me a phlegmatic neophobe. (Actually, don’t.) Where others may dive right in, hit the ground running, or perch precipitously on the bleeding edge, you’ll find me keeping cool and dry on the sidelines. From touchpoints to toolchains to tech—when it comes to solving business problems, it’s often hard to know where to begin, thanks to the rapidly increasing complexity of it all. And while common wisdom privileges a “fail fast, fail early” mentality, I’m here to propose an alternative that has less to do with “fast” and “early,” and more to do with strategically sitting back.
As someone who likes to flirt with career suicide (see my HR jar), I’m going to go out on a limb here and admit that despite working in tech for over a decade, I’m a big, bad laggard. You won’t find me whispering sweet nothings to Siri, motorized longboarding to chatbot meetups or even updating my OS unless I’m nagged about it a few times first.
There’s a logic to my inaction, and it has something to do with the Lindy Effect. The concept most notably appears in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.” Taleb, a trader and risk analyst turned essayist, generalizes that the lifespan of technologies can be roughly predicted by their existing age. Newer technologies (VR, tablets, chatbots) are more fragile and have shorter life expectancies than older ones (leather shoes, wheels, books). By this logic, we can comfortably predict that most of the stuff touted as the hottest new tech is destined for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—physically, metaphorically or both. It’s just a matter of when.
For organizations and the individuals that comprise them, it also follows that while staying informed of trends is necessary and helpful, not investing too deeply, too quickly is not necessarily hurtful. In fact, being strategically impassive—that is, saving yourself the trouble of reacting to things until they’ve been “time-tested” or proven their staying power—has its upsides. To quote Frank Chimero: “In one way, it is easier to be inexperienced: You don’t have to learn what is no longer relevant.” When it comes to technical infrastructures, you don’t have to disassemble what’s no longer relevant, either.
Beyond the short-term upside of conserving energy (and capital), waiting before acting has longer-term benefits. It’s a topic that Peter Thiel of PayPal and Palantir fame tackles in another good read, called “Zero to One.” He believes that companies that forfeit initial mindshare—and the attendant downsides of firsthand exposure to volatility and risk—in favor of watching and learning from others’ mistakes can set themselves up to capitalize on what he calls a “last-mover advantage.” The gist is this: Make the last big development in a specific market, monopolize mindshare, reap outsize upside. (This is precisely what Google did with its search engine.)
It’s not just techies and tech companies that stand to benefit from keeping themselves on ice. At a work session with a Fortune 50 big-box retailer just last week, I was heartened to hear a senior leader loudly dismiss the idea that they should be “ashamed of being a follower and not a leader.” From her perspective, her company’s competitive edge lay in staying laser-focused on an enduring promise (which has more to do with serving people than the shiniest new tech), while allowing others to pioneer solutions to complex operational, supply-chain, technology and culture challenges and clear a path forward.
After all, in a crowded business landscape, differentiation is predicated on being disproportionately good at something. (Thiel offers 10x as a rule-of-thumb multiplier for just how much better you have to be than your closest substitute on some important dimension to count as disproportionately good.) In the endurance sport of business, the principles of motion economy apply: Being good is just as much about the stuff you don’t do as the stuff you do do.
And what if motion economy is as much a predictor of performance in business as it is in athletics? This is sort of what Frances Frei and Anne Morriss are getting at in “Uncommon Service.” Frei, a professor at Harvard Business School (slash short-lived, would-be Uber savior), and Morriss suggest that in order to strategically outperform on the things that matter most to your customers—that is, to be disproportionately good at some some things—companies must necessarily and deliberately underperform on some others. That means they must not do certain things.
Take the example of Norwegian Air Shuttle. Taking a page out of the Southwest playbook, the European airline began vocally positioning itself as the the first low-cost long-haul carrier back in 2014, promising $69 flights from the U.S. to Europe in the coming years. While competitors have historically relied on in-flight service offerings for differentiation, chairman and CEO Bjorn Kjos took the opposite tack, offering no-frills service in exchange for rock-bottom fares. The most basic tickets don’t include baggage, food or drink, or a seat reservation; entertainment is limited; and blankets and pillows have to be purchased for all fare classes. To borrow Frei’s parlance, the secret to Norwegian’s continued success—today, it’s the third-largest low-cost carrier in Europe, worth just shy of $1 billion—comes down to Kjos’ commitment to underperforming on the things budget travelers don’t care about (amenities) in order to outperform on the things they do (price).
The bottom line? Forfeiting activity on some fronts to consistently invest in others promises greater opportunities for differentiation and competitive advantage over time.
Nowhere is strategic inaction, or at least strategic ignorance, more important than in the world of data. To quote Taleb once again: “[People often] think that intelligence is about noticing things are relevant (detecting patterns); in a complex world, intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant (avoiding false patterns).” In ”Fooled by Randomness,” a book entirely devoted to big errors in the ways we interpret big data, Taleb advises against regularly reading the news as a way to adjust for the cognitive illusion that the more information we consume, the more knowledge we absorb—and overreacting to fragments of information.
If you can handle an exercise analogy from someone whose whole premise is sitting it out, here’s an electrical engineering analogy from someone who also routinely trips the circuit breaker.
There’s a concept called signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) that can be used to illustrate the types of mistakes we’re prone to make when we expose ourselves to too much information. Signal here is the valuable stuff; noise the proverbial chaff. The larger the measure, the more the desired signal stands out in comparison to the noise. The problem is, the ratio of signal to noise changes based on the frequency of sampling. Anyone who checks their stocks or cryptos knows this all too well. Your Ethereum might be down $24 this hour but up $650 this year. Your hourly view is not wrong, but it’s a distortion of a larger reality.
Because we’re both flooded with data and wired to hunt for signals, our habits of getting information actually run counter to our capacity to make sense of it. Exposing ourselves to more stuff—whether numerical or trend data, or just the headlines in the paper—more frequently can actually undermine understanding rather than help it (as anyone who’s ever spent a lunch break on Twitter can attest). The trick, according to Taleb, is to engage less frequently so we can better catch “very large changes in data or conditions, never small ones,” operating on the faith that the “significant signals have a way to reach [us].”
So what does this all mean for you and me? Outside of being a really lofty way to rationalize procrastinating to your manager (give it a try and report back), a healthy dose of strategic inaction can actually make us better team members and client partners.
Allow me to wax metaphysical for a moment.
By design, agency life privileges activity—effort, outputs, hours, busyness, “utilization.” At its extremes, this can create a production mentality which invites insecurity and panic in the absence of constant (and apparent) forward motion, scatters our energies and penalizes both efficiency and invisible acts of thinking. We routinely treat creative labor the way we treat manual labor: standard set of inputs in, standard set of outcomes out. But the math doesn’t work out, and we all know it.
Creativity is irrational, nonlinear, alchemical. It requires a state of natural focus or “flow.”
As W. Timothy Galloway writes in the cult classic, “The Inner Game of Tennis”:
“(It) is not achieved by staring hard at something. It is not trying to force focus, nor does it mean thinking hard about something. Natural focus occurs when the mind is interested. When this occurs, the mind is drawn irresistibly toward the object (or subject) of interest. It is effortless and relaxed, not tense and overly controlled.”
Think about the last time you kicked off a project. Did everybody scatter in a semi-panic? Did you jump right in and begin to decode a vast trove of documents? Have you ever found yourself more confused the more you learned? Have you ever abstained from just asking the client, opting instead to MacGyver your way to the answers you needed? Or have you tried to predict what they were going to say when you did? Has your perception of the ask ever done an about-face two weeks later? And what about all the stuff you think you need to do to grow your career? The classes you want to take. The new tools you want to learn. All the books you want to read but haven’t.
The alternative doesn’t mean succumbing to inertia or opting out of the Sisyphean slog. (Spoiler alert: You’ll still have to fill out your time sheet.) It just means becoming more comfortable doing less. Less forcing, less striving, less task completing, less overengineering and hamster wheeling. By shifting the burden to things to prove their need to be done, we create space and buy time for the “significant signals” to reach us. We convert the unknown, the unplanned and the unmanaged from headwinds to tailwinds. The payoff? A more natural, more intentional state of momentum.
All you gotta do is, well—don’t.
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Welcome to the wonderful world of strategy: the best, most interesting and arguably the most ambiguous job in this business. I understand there’s some confusion as to what exactly strategy is—given that my family still doesn’t understand what I do because there’s no main character from “Mad Men” to align it with—and therefore who’s likely to make a great strategist.
Strategy is the discipline formerly known as account planning. Back when account planning was invented, it was about understanding a broad target audience, gleaning insights and writing briefs that served as springboards for great work. And great work was limited to a much smaller number of mass media channels at that time: print, TV, OOH. Obviously, the world has changed a lot since then and with it, the practice of planning. The term strategy came about to encompass the broadening of the discipline’s scope—to include brand strategy, creative strategy, communications strategy, design strategy, digital strategy, social strategy and depending where you work, a fair amount of corporate strategy as well.
Well, that sounds daunting. What does it mean? While you can specialize in virtually any of the things listed above, strategy tends to be best suited for people with varied interests and an insatiable curiosity about almost anything and really, everything. A strategist’s primary job is the connection of disparate and sometimes seemingly unrelated dots to create a plan that solves a problem for a business and for a consumer. We still write briefs to inspire great creative work, but our job goes well beyond that today.
As strategists, we have an opportunity to shape and create better experiences for human beings. We have the power to encourage brands and companies to represent themselves more honestly, to impact how people across different genders and races see themselves represented in media, and to challenge our collective thinking about the way things are—and the way they could be.
A great strategist is part anthropologist (a student of cultures), part sociologist (a student of people and how we are shaped by our society), part psychologist (someone who seeks to understand the human mind and what makes us behave the ways we do), part analyst (adept at reading and interpreting data to uncover hidden truths about our habits) and part creative (skilled storytellers who are energized at the prospect of changing how people think, feel or act via inspiring work).
I’m going to let you in on a little secret: Most strategists don’t start out as strategists. They take winding paths, ones that often begin in other disciplines within an agency, a related field or a different field entirely. There’s no right path, so don’t worry if you haven’t done all the “right” things. (If you secure an internship in strategy, you’re ahead of the game.) While few strategists share the same background, good ones often share similar traits. And you can highlight these traits in interviews, even if you don’t have much formal strategy experience yet.
The best strategists always seek to understand why something happens the way it does—or what makes someone do the things they do. Great strategists ask a lot of questions and enjoy spending time trying to figure people and things out. They tend to be people with varied interests, who demonstrate both an enthusiasm for and a commitment to learning new things.
Likely related to our curiosity, strategists tend to be people watchers who recognize that we learn more from watching how humans behave rather than simply listening to what they say. The best strategists are not only fascinated by people, but they naturally tend toward empathy and compassion—finding it easy to put themselves in someone else’s shoes and understand what they want and need without judgment or criticism. They embrace the humanity in any situation.
Standout strategists are equally good at talking to people and listening to what they have to say. Listening leads strategists to compelling insights rooted in real human truths, which lay the foundation for engaging stories. Great strategists are dynamic storytellers who possess the ability to make the incredibly complex feel simple—or at the very least, logical and easily digestible. And it’s not enough to be exceptional writers; strategists must also be highly skilled at presenting their ideas to a broad range of audiences.
As strategists, we deal heavily in possibility and opportunity. Great strategists are drawn to and excited by the prospect of solving complex and often layered problems, but also energized by possibilities. They possess the business acumen to understand not only how a business works today, but the imagination and the optimism to envision how it might work better tomorrow.
Great strategists are creative people who appreciate and voraciously consume creative content in myriad forms: books, films, plays, shows, stories, articles, podcasts—the list goes on and on. Exposure to a continuous flow of creative stimulus provides fresh perspective and inspires strategists to think about the problems they’re tasked with solving in new ways, helping them draw parallels, frame challenges and communicate opportunities in ways they otherwise may not have. This ultimately helps them to become better partners to their creative teammates.
If the above description sounds like you, find ways to demonstrate these traits in your interviews. Strategy is an endlessly fascinating field for those that love a challenge–and we’re always looking for critical thinkers and courageous creators who are unafraid to shake things up in order to make them better.
Interested in pursing a career in strategy? Check out VSA’s open positions.
