The Drum Awards for B2B: a closer look at the Best B2B Brand Campaign category

These awards celebrate the companies and people around the world bringing creativity to B2B marketing, with the Best B2B Brand Campaign category judged on how well campaigns utilized their channels to drive brand awareness, perceptions and momentum.

DHL Supply Chain for Ultimate Sidekick

Ultimate Sidekick pushed DHL out of its comfort zone, enabling it to capture the attention of customers, employees and companies across the globe. DHL’s aim was to disrupt the traditional corporate and serious supply chain world with a stand-out campaign that would gain cut-through, entertain C-suite audiences and elevate logistics communications from the everyday to the extraordinary.

The brand pushed itself and its guidelines to the limit, from the way it visually represented itself to the way it talked and positioned its employees.

With the unprecedented changes DHL saw over the past few years, it felt it needed to make a new bold statement – one that showed that team DHL was ready to take on any supply chain challenge alongside its customers. To achieve this, it needed to think big, and so took inspiration from some of the highest-grossing films of the past decade to create a spectacular multi-channel campaign to turn heads and position DHL Supply Chain as the #ULTIMATESIDEKICK.

This powerful combination of cinematic art direction, stunt performers, special effects, bold headlines and heroic photography hit the mark and boosted brand engagement, increased sales and retention, and earned brand recognition from the sector.

Addleshaw Goddard for Rhyme and Reason

Business law firm Addleshaw Goddard operates in an incredibly noisy competitive environment, with over 100 firms across the industry together publishing hundreds of thousands of marketing outputs a year.

To stand out from the crowd, deliver on its imaginative brand positioning, and celebrate the importance of law to our economy, the firm turned to legal poetry – because lawyers and poets share the same principal tool of words. And the approach earned significant attention.

An emotive, multi-channel brand-building campaign in a niche area achieved over 3.2m online impressions, a reach of 370,000+ people and brand engagement beyond expectations – and stimulated a marked increase in people searching for the firm.

Stein IAS and Wongdoody for Juniper Networks

Juniper is used to working smart in the shadow of networking giant Cisco, and has historically concentrated on solutions marketing rather than brand marketing. But with the market for infrastructure set to grow – and Juniper poised to grow the most due to advances in its technology – it saw the opportunity to step up and challenge its category and competitors.

And it did, launching the most significant brand campaign in its 25+ year history. In a brand space that too often is faceless and jargon-riddled, Juniper led with personality – with empathy, relatability and storytelling. It challenged IT leaders and teams to imagine that they could do more – much more – with Juniper as their network partner.

And it unleashed an omnichannel brand campaign that for the first time put Juniper Networks on TV in key markets and on the F1 racing circuit, as well as on digital and social channels, to turn heightened consideration into business results. The campaign also increased Juniper’s brand consideration by 69%, correlating to the company’s 38% 2021 increase in enterprise revenue.

HeyLet’sGo for Envestnet

As one of the world’s leading fintech brands, Evernest needed to build awareness and interest for its new client portal while continuing to support its mission of helping advisors make an intelligent financial life a reality for clients. The category is filled with marketing tropes and overwhelming product detail; Envestnet needed a way to spark viewers’ interest in the platform.

HeyLet’sGo found that the best way to show the power of Envestnet’s platform was through money-obsessed Mr Krabs from hit cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants. The agency imagined a client portal dashboard using past episodes’ storylines to figure out his expenses for his small business, cash flow and investments line-by-line. A three-minute film, three TV commercials, and 20 pieces of web content featuring Mr Krabs were created and all creative drove financial advisors to the interactive experience, where they could explore the financial impact of five different scenarios.

True for Acora

Unknown IT services provider Acora embarked on a mission to reimagine its category and create a new normal for the industry. IT services have long been governed by Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that define which services the provider will deliver and to what level. But when an SLA is in place, there’s no requirement for the service provider to innovate for its customer.

For Acora to win market share in a crowded market, the traditional way of doing things wouldn’t suffice, so it changed the rules in its favor. The brand challenged the status quo and put its name on the map, creating an industry-first, category-defining service that changed the business culture and moved with the times.

‘Long Live the XLA’ became a call to arms for professionals to stand up against sub-par SLAs and demand more from IT service providers – a movement highlighting the inadequacies of the industry standards. The campaign achieved widespread coverage from industry analysts such as Gartner and Forrester. Acora’s share of category searches more than doubled (an increase of 2.18%). And with a share of search proven to be an accurate proxy for market share in IT services, this increase equates to a £4.7m uplift in sales revenue in just four months.

Elixrr

Aiming to stir up conversation, Elixrr launched a campaign satirically highlighting the bad stereotypes inundating consultants. As a consulting firm of ‘challengers,’ Elixrr has been on a mission to do things differently from the start – recognizing first-hand the unfavorable practices adopted industry-wide.

Elixrr wanted to tell an honest story that would flow seamlessly from above the line to digital, complete with an immersive experience on its website as the final destination. The campaign launched with the key objective to raise Elixrr’s profile for London-based C-suites across all industries.

With a limited budget for all channels and TV commercial production, Elixrr set out to achieve 1.5m views during an eight-week period. It achieved 1m more views than the original target and saw a 60% increase in leads.

Following the success, Elixrr took the campaign to the US, strategically focusing on C-suite in New York City and aiming to achieve 37m targeted impressions.

Ogilvy for Workday

Ogilvy developed a new brand platform ‘For a Changing World’ to position Workday as an innovator that helps businesses not only deal with the dizzying pace of change, but embrace it.

‘For a Changing World’ placed Workday at the center of the organization, making it a single solution for organizational growth. Ogilvy then developed specific messaging for every member of the C-suite to acknowledge their unique challenges and offer targeted solutions.

The tone was optimistic and humorous to make change seem a little less scary. Ogilvy chose warm colors for the design system to stand out among a sea of tech blues and greens, and developed custom illustrations that represented the diversity of its customers and their experiences.

To help grow awareness against competitors with bigger media budgets, the campaign was used consistently across all Workday marketing, including chief exec keynotes, thought leadership and virtual events, as well as TV, newspapers, magazines and out-of-home (OOH). Ogilvy targeted its audience’s passion points by sponsoring F1 in Europe and golf tournaments in the US, while focusing on other sports programming including the Olympics, tennis and cycling.

Meta for Workplace

Workplace is a business communication tool from Meta, a SAAS product competing in the enterprise communication category. A lack of brand awareness meant businesses were unaware of what it was or what it could help achieve.

The brief was to raise brand awareness by communicating that Workplace brings workers closer together, so they feel more connected and human at work. The campaign celebrated the small items, belongings and personal quirks people bring to work to feel more human. Meta made these the heroes of its TV advert, posters and digital assets to grab the audience’s attention and provide the vehicle it needed to deliver its message.

Code and Theory for Amazon Ads

‘Your Brand Their World’ represented a big opportunity to reorient Amazon Ads, moving its creative output away from product-forward messaging and towards immersive, impactful campaign-level thinking.

Amazon Ads showcased that it can reach customers when they’re streaming, gaming, listening and reading through its well-established properties such as Twitch, Fire TV, Prime Video and Amazon Music.

Code and Theory created and placed highly impactful, targeted and contextually relevant assets including a series of 30-, 15- and 6-second videos, in addition to the video assets that will run across social media, including TikTok. Display banners will run in trade publications in the US, CA, UK, DE and JP markets.

For more information about the awards and how you can attend/watch the results, head over to the dedicated site.