Workday is a finance and HR company with 50% of the Fortune 500 as customers. While it has grown massively since its founding in 2005, it struggles with brand awareness among prospective buyers: C-suite executives. To meet its goal of reaching $10 billion in annual revenue by 2025, Workday had to think big. They needed to make everyone, not just senior professionals, care about a B2B brand. That’s because while those senior professionals are Workday’s customers, the brand must also appeal to a much wider group: shareholders, analysts, prospective employees, and 60 million users.

“You’re such a rock star!” Inside the halls of many offices, this is the ultimate compliment for a job well done. But ever think how that makes real rock stars feel? The legends who have trained, toured and lived the hard rocker life to earn the title? Workday, the finance and HR company responsible for creating more rock stars than any other, enlisted five rock legends to send a message to the corporate world: Stop calling each other rock stars. These rock stars banded together and showed up wherever ‘corporate’ types are to let their feelings be known. From social media, to the Wall Street Journal, to the biggest stage - the Super bowl, “Rock Star’ takes a simple universal insight - something said every day in every office - and turns up the volume on the usual B2B conversation.

This campaign represented Workday’s biggest marketing opportunity to date. It was the role of communications to lean into Workday’s core values – including employees, customer service, and fun - to help reach a new, culturally-broad viewership. We looked beyond the traditional realms of enterprise software to deliver unified messaging on Workday’s first-ever Super Bowl ad across five diverse comms channels (Workday’s blog, employees, execs, owned media, and social). We wanted our audience to walk away with the key information that Workday helps organizations adapt and thrive in a changing world. Put even more simply: we help organizations become rockstars in the workplace. To set the stage, we targeted senior professionals with our ads on LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube in early November of 2022. We then teased the campaign with a WSJ print ad recognizing the best managed corporations as being rockstars and with eye-catching OOH in key media DMAs.

‘Rock Star’ brought together five legends of music: Ozzy Osborne, Paul Stanley, Joan Jett, Billy Idol and Gary Clark Jr. with a message to the corporate world: Stop calling each other Rock stars. The process began with finding the right mix of talent to fully represent the rock and roll community. Each scene was crafted to represent the true nature the artist, from Joan Jett’s tour bus, to Billy Idol’s custom leather jacket, to the iconic Kiss sign on stage. With high rock star energy, our unlikely spokespeople teased the campaign on Linked in and Twitter, then took the biggest stage ever, the Superbowl to reach a broader audience. From our teaser campaign to the promotional activities organized within the halls of Workday, the campaign was crafted to embody rock star rebellion.

Workday far surpassed our corporate communication goals and comms channel engagements both internally and externally.

More than 350 original articles stemmed from our global media outreach, with syndication across an additional 1,225 outlets, and earned media impressions exceeded 4.35B. Coverage was overall balanced to positive in tone, with strong message pull through related to our first-ever ad, the talent involved, and the “rockstar” story we portrayed through the creative. Some of our topline coverage results include:

1. Strong syndication from outlets including Today Show (4.8M+ views in addition to 188 syndications across NBC affiliates), Associated Press (309 syndications), and Reuters (87 syndications).

2. 9 interviews with spokespeople, which allowed us to control the narrative and get our message out there in a strategic and bold way.

3. More than 8 outlets included us in round-up articles, highlighting the top Super Bowl ads including ranking in the USA Today Ad Meter Top 10, being called out as The Drum’s “#1 Super Bowl Teaser”, and landing in The Washington Post’s top 5 Super Bowl ads.

Data from Workday’s most recent brand health tracker (fielded from Feb-March 2023) indicated the campaign triggered a positive impact on the brand in Q1. Unaided brand awareness jumped +6 points from the previous quarter. Across key metrics - including likelihood to consider Workday, brand perceptions related to trust, interest in learning more, and reputation - those who saw ‘Rockstar’ were significantly more likely to report higher ratings/more positive sentiments than those who did not see the ad.