Fidelity International approached us for some support on a through-the-line campaign for a UK campaign aimed at increasing awareness and interest in the Fidelity Special Situations Fund (UK).
Fidelity International
A through-the-line advertising campaign for Fidelity Special Situations Fund (UK)
The Brief
The project led with an advertising campaign for print and digital, communicating that the contrarian Fidelity Special Situations team recognise opportunity and growth potential where others don’t.
The above-the-line creative concept and messaging were then to inform a range of below-the-line content, for the Fidelity website, electronic direct mail and use in social media.
Where the advertising message focused exclusively on the contrarian message for tumultuous times, multi-channel campaign assets were required to communicate how the Special Situations team actually worked, describing the investment cycle and using investment stories to provide a bit of real-life context.
Our Response
For the advertising, we received permission to ‘bend’ brand guidelines to feature the fund manager and make him into our hero. Fund marketing rarely presents a hero (however flawed), and rarer-still directly associates product marketing with an individual, (however much he may be the archetypal company man).
We sought to reinforce the contrarian perspective, choosing unusual treatments of an intense portrait in order to really stand out. Unusual, at least, for asset management circles.
Our below-the-line response was to be a mix of video and static assets which drew upon the advertising work, as well as referencing some of the existing Special Situations marketing collateral.
We scripted and developed two animated videos to be published to the Special Situations website and promoted across other industry websites.
In addition, these videos were created with a mind to chop up and extract some flexible social media assets. Our social assets were to tie both sides of the campaign together, referencing the Alex Wright hero of the advertising and presenting simple insights from the investment stories.
The Result
The print creative used an intense crop of the manager, Alex Wright, stare out of the page/screen, right at the reader, and in type presented the simple proposition that “A contrarian sees things differently”.
The digital creative, lacking the same sort of ‘room to breathe’ used a close crop of the face, slowly zooming into one of the eyes, to create an unconventional and arresting image. Emphasising detail in this manner was intended to stand in stark contrast with the webpage on which it was published.
In our below-the-line work, we created animated videos which told the ‘stock story’ of Special Situations investments in Burford Capital and Pearson.
To ensure our videos would have an evergreen value we took initial inspiration from an existing investment process explainer video. We adapted and embellished the graphic language used to tell that story and applied it to our two new stories, building out, and referencing back, to create a sense of continuity with the existing Special Situations comms.
Latterly we chopped and edited the videos into three videos for social distribution. The first two distilled key messages from the campaign intro: the first recreating the digital creative and the second condensing the investment cycle story into its shortest version.
The third took a different tack, developing a typographic style used in the video into an AfterEffects video template that could be used, and reused, to communicate simple marketing messages.
The campaign ran throughout Q4 2018 and into 2019. The below-the-line work was distributed which saw the Pearson video spending sometime in December as the most popular video on RSMR Hub.
