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.
Chief Creative Officer Curt Schreiber was recently a guest on the podcast “Prodity: Product by Design,” hosted by Kyle Evans.
On the show, Curt and Kyle discuss the power of constraints and negative space in design, the importance and power of reconceptualizing brand identity during periods of business transition, and how to create multistakeholder design in the modern world.
“Product by Design” features interviews with founders, leaders and experts about product management, artificial intelligence (AI), user experience design, technology, and how we can create the best product experiences for users and our businesses.
You can listen to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Transistor.
VSA CEO Anne-Marie Rosser was recently published in Forbes magazine with her piece, “Four Things Your Marketing Agency Wants You To Know About AI.” Check out an excerpt of the piece below.
To say that AI is top of mind for most business leaders feels like an understatement. A recent IBM study found that the global AI adoption rate was 35% in 2022. And in Q3 2023, the term “AI” was uttered an average of 3.7 times per S&P 500 analyst call—more than double the previous quarter.
There’s a definite edge of panic to the excitement as companies jockey to showcase they’re incorporating the new tech into their operations and leaders scramble to forecast AI’s impact on their business. Meanwhile, pundits surround them, proclaiming that AI is either the next renaissance or the end of the world.
If you’re a business leader struggling to find your place in the AI discourse, my advice is this: Look to your marketing agency. Here’s why.
Agencies are used to helping businesses work through thorny problems, like cultural shifts, internal reorgs, M&As, new patterns and trends, and a constant drive toward growth. Clients come to them to get ahead or stay ahead, and a big part of that has always been figuring out how to leverage new technologies for a competitive advantage.
Agencies also have a unique finger on the cultural pulse, as they consistently work with different clients in different industries with different perspectives. This gives them a rare ecosystem of use cases, research and conversations that they can dissect and learn from.
As my own agency begins to help our clients create and implement AI strategies, there are four key pieces of advice that keep rising to the top. Here’s what we’ve been telling our clients:
I’ve been seeing a lot of talk about how if your business doesn’t get into AI right now, you’re going to miss the boat and never get this chance back.
In the words of my colleague, “That’s not how technology works.” In fact, many successful businesses have found their way into emerging technologies by waiting until they stabilize, researching what people like and don’t like about their uses, and capitalizing on that experience to turn out superior products.
Plus, there are still a lot of things, from copyright laws to data protection, that don’t have the guardrails companies need to manage risk in AI adoption.
It’s OK to adopt AI in a way that makes sense for your business. If that means taking huge leaps because risk is in your DNA, great. If that means hanging back and watching what works and what doesn’t before investing, also great. Let your purpose—not the hype—drive your decision-making.
WESTBOROUGH, Mass. – DetecTogether, an organization dedicated to saving lives by teaching people how to detect cancer early, recently brought on strategy and creative agency VSA Partners to renew its “Response Time Matters” campaign targeting a high-risk demographic: firefighters.
“Cancer is the leading cause of death in firefighters,” says Tricia Laursen, President and Executive Director of DetecTogether. “And by raising awareness of what a cancer symptom can feel or look like and accelerating behavior shifts, we can help change that.”
The videos star FDNY firefighters along with firefighter and paramedic Jason Patton, whose “Fire Department Chronicles” social media series has nearly 2 million followers.
“The campaign hinges on two ideas critical to breaking into the firefighter audience: humor and authenticity,” says Mike Lee, VSA Director of Strategy. By partnering with Patton—who’s known for his comedic content—and the FDNY, the campaign delivers on both.
”Our jobs are incredibly serious,” says Patton. “Lives are on the line. So between jobs, while we’re at the firehouse, we like to lighten things up. And that’s exactly what DetecTogether’s videos do, using comedy to get firefighters taking action against cancer.”
Doug Gallow, VSA Associate Partner of Client Engagement, adds, “These partnerships allow our campaign to come from the firefighting ranks itself—a message for firefighters by firefighters.”
Occupational cancer is the No. 1 cause of line-of-duty deaths in the fire service. Firefighters are 9% more likely to be diagnosed and 14% more likely to die from cancer than the general population. By raising awareness of what warning signs of cancer can feel or look like and motivating firefighters to use DetecTogether’s simple roadmap to early detection—called “3 Steps Detect”—the organization is working to help improve these outcomes.
“We want every firefighter to use 3 Steps Detect, because it can save their lives, and we want every person to know about it, too. This campaign is part of our ultimate goal to bring the lifesaving advantage of early cancer detection to the entire population,” says Laursen.
The 3 Steps Detect process includes:
The worst cancer diagnosis is a late one. The National Institutes of Health (2022) found that 50% of cancer cases are late-stage diagnoses, and only 14% of cancer cases are identified through recommended screenings. DetecTogether’s mission is to bring the lifesaving advantage of early cancer detection to all, because awareness and action by patients plays a vital role in getting a diagnosis earlier.
As part of achieving this goal, and with content quality and versatility in mind, VSA Partners captured video at the Fire Department of New York’s training academy on Randall’s Island, known for its tough courses and highly respected programs. The media plan, executed by Prohaska Consulting, provides DetecTogether with 12 months of fresh content that can create trackable metrics around firefighters’ actions and beyond. The refreshed campaign augments the existing organic components—like kits for fire stations that contain edgy, informative posters about the early signs of cancer—with digital, paid social and influencer promotions.
“We’re excited to save lives. That’s what the work is about, and VSA Partners helped us do that with creativity and humor along the way,” Laursen says.
Summing up the work, Patton adds, “Anytime you can get firefighters singing and dancing is a good day. Watch the videos—you’ll see what I mean.”
Response Time Matters was made possible with the support provided by EMW-2021-FP-00573,1A Auto, Last Call Foundation, Powertech Controls, the Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY), Firefighter Cancer Support Network, and the Center for Fire, Rescue, and EMS Research.
Check out the campaign videos, and learn more about Response Time Matters.
DetecTogether is a nonprofit education and advocacy organization located in Westborough, Mass. It was founded to address an unmet need in the cancer world. While it is undisputed that early cancer detection leads to the best health outcomes, no one was teaching people how to identify early warning signs of cancer. In consultation with doctors from top cancer centers, founders Jim and Nancy Coghlin and their family set out to provide people with this life-saving education.
Now in its second decade, the mission of DetecTogether is to save lives by teaching people how to detect cancer early and be active partners in their healthcare.
Chief Growth Officer Ariadna Navarro recently shared her thoughts on building breakthrough brands in a piece published on MarTech Series. Ari explores the importance of truly differentiated brand experiences, the cyclical nature of brand-consumer relationships and how even product-driven, tech companies need strong branding to truly stand out.
Check out an excerpt below, or read the full article.
No matter how innovative your product or service is, or how niche of an industry your business operates in, it’s excruciating to find differentiation these days … and it’s a never-ending chase. The acceleration of a perpetually changing future has made it all that much more critical to sharpen the most important tool you have for standing out from your competitors: your brand.
Before digging deeper into how a brand is built, it’s crucial to first understand what we mean when we say “brand.” While many people (even some in our industry) conflate brand with advertising or the products they sell, those are only pieces of what you do that make up the larger idea of who you are. Put simply, a brand is the most compelling articulation of your business strategy—a clarification of what you stand for, and the basis of your relationship with customers. Note the word “compelling.” It has to be true, relevant and differentiated.
Using the Silicon Valley startup landscape as an example, you can see the effects of using product as a brand (PaaB). Technology is not a differentiator anymore; it’s an equalizer. Although tech-driven, business-model innovation is great, it has to come with the development of brand. Think about how many times you’ve heard a business described as “the Uber of X” or “the Warby Parker of Y.” Just as quickly as those household names upended industries, they were engulfed in a sea of copycats all sporting minimal, templatized UX; clean, muted design; and a familiarly witty, human tone. When ideas are only new for a moment and products are easily imitated, “disruption” becomes more of a category than a way of standing out.
To avoid fights on features and performance comparisons, it’s up to brands to create a more authentic connection with customers, building relationships and loyalty over time. That’s what I call a “better human experience.” It’s a pursuit to create value for all stakeholders—employees, customers, investors, clients. But how do you commit to standing for something in an ever-changing landscape? It starts with conviction—fighting the urge to follow every trend or to say something broad enough to appeal to everyone, and instead find what’s true to you and relevant to your audiences. Identifying that sweet spot is what makes the connection between a brand and a customer resemble any other human relationship. For the same reasons love isn’t eroded by a single argument, customers stick by brands that stay true to the values that attracted them in the first place.
Ever.Ag, a leader in agricultural software, data, analytics, and finance, recently unveiled a new campaign that challenges the limitations of phrases like “farm to table.” The campaign highlights how its solutions help folks working in the global food supply chain manage and optimize the intricate and delicate ecosystem of everything that happens in between the table and the farm.
Boasting decades of hands-on experience, the new Ever.Ag brand name better represents the depth and breadth of its capabilities. This 360 campaign found the connecting thread of a story encompassing so many of Ever.Ag’s proven successes in the industry.
Ever.Ag has a diverse customer base that spans the agriculture supply chain. Farmers rely on it to manage risk, food manufacturers use it to help reduce waste, and retailers use it to inform sustainability efforts. This new campaign needed to speak to all of those people and businesses and demonstrate exactly how Ever.Ag can help people drive progress and efficiency in these constantly evolving industries.
Ever.Ag is making a difference in the world around us by envisioning a more fruitful, durable farming ecosystem. This campaign captures the essence of their capabilities without losing sight of the central story—it’s a lot to do, so Ever.Ag does a lot.”
To help create the campaign, Ever.Ag tapped VSA Partners, a creative and strategy agency that designs for a better human experience. VSA’s reputation for making the complex compelling was a perfect fit for telling Ever.Ag’s story and ensuring that its messaging would resonate with a wide range of audiences.
“At the end of the day, Ever.Ag is here to help the people we serve,” says Toby Lee, Chief Marketing Officer of Ever.Ag. “VSA Partners knows how to take a truly intricate business and find the human story. We’re really proud of how this campaign turned out and the tone it sets for Ever.Ag’s exciting future.”
VSA worked with Ever.Ag to create a powerful narrative that would lean into the trust that comes from generations of know-how and deep partnerships, as well as Ever.Ag’s innovative technology and visionary data that tackles the industry’s biggest challenges. By upending phrases like “pasture to plate” and “seed to store,” VSA set the stage for conveying Ever.Ag’s vast capabilities and for communicating its status as a premier intelligent supply chain and risk management company in agriculture.
“Ever.Ag is making a difference in the world around us by envisioning a more fruitful, durable farming ecosystem,” says VSA CEO Anne-Marie Rosser. “This campaign captures the essence of their capabilities without losing sight of the central story—it’s a lot to do, so Ever.Ag does a lot.”
Chief Growth Officer Ariadna Navarro was recently featured on MarketScale, discussing her views on how businesses can move forward with integrating AI into their operations in an ethical and sustainable way.
Ari outlines her approach with four pillars: transparency, boundaries, accountability and education.
