Despite spending millions on marketing and being a 25-year-old category-leader in the freelance marketplace, Upwork’s brand awareness with their B2B audience (large businesses, CEO’s, and hiring managers) remained extremely low.

With the momentum of the pandemic, the brief was to increase brand awareness, establish Upwork as the category leader, and get business leaders to reject the outdated hiring practices, embrace the new way of working, and tap into Upwork’s 12million global freelancers. So Upwork needed a message and campaign that would be difficult to ignore and impossible to forget.

We brought a deceased CEO back from the dead to share a provocative and long overdue message: the old ways of working (office, 9-5, 2weeks vacation) are dead and were made up by people like him. Our campaign featured a musical and shorter films to launch Upwork’s new platform – “This Is How We Work Now" while espousing Upwork’s many benefits.

For 200 years, society has treated the old ways of working as sacred and unchangeable. To help euthanize that sacred cow (humanely of course), we brought a deceased CEO back from the dead to share a provocative and long overdue message: the old ways of working (in an office, 9-5, two weeks vacation) are dead and were entirely made up by people like him. So why not make up something better?

And since the only thing more memorable than a song is a song sung by a decomposing corpse, we wrote and composed an original musical performance for the launch of Upwork’s new brand platform – “This Is How We Work Now.

Beyond the 2:26 musical, the campaign includes 15 different films, including :60, :30, :15 and :06 spots in which the diseased CEO espouses the many benefits that Upwork offers, all while losing various body parts.

The professional employment industry is an overwhelmingly … professional category. It’s fairly serious and filled with dull, rational work around individual employment.

To stand out we asked ourselves "How far in the other direction can we possibly go?" and thus challenged industry norms in nearly every aspect. Our spokesperson was a decomposed-CEO. Our hero spot was a musical. And our message was about getting business leaders to rethink their entire approach to working.

Like Jacob Marley from A Christmas Carol, death gave our former CEO clarity. He sees the mistakes he made and now he’s back to help us avoid following in his footsteps. We used long (2 min+) and short formats (:60, :30, :15 and :6) to clear away the cobwebs of history and demolish outdated ideas. It’s a story of disruption, accessibility and transparency. The youth want it. The present demands it. And it's fun to watch.

Our key audience target was business leaders. To reach as many business decision makers as possible, we focused placements in their areas of interest: business, news, and sports.

The campaign - led by our anthem musical declaring that the old ways of working are officially dead - launched nationally on September 28, 2022. The week of the launch, we placed our film in big cultural business, news, and sports moments like Thursday Night Football, Sunday Night Football, and a key late-season MLB game to get our message outside of just the world of business and into culture at large.

The musical was quickly followed up by 15 shorter format spots (:60, :30, :15 and :6's) in which the diseased CEO espouses the many benefits that Upwork offers, all while losing various body parts. The work will continue to run through June 2023 on a series of linear CTV, OLV, streaming.

The work was a runaway success. Despite being the category leader in remote freelance, before the campaign, Upwork’s brand awareness remained more depressed than a 1950’s middle manager. Extremely low. But after our dead CEO broke the news that the old ways of working were made up by people like him, Upwork’s Unaided brand awareness increased 45% since the campaign launched. Their first mention awareness more than doubled. And Unaided Awareness with Upwork’s most important audience, large businesses, went up by a whopping 203%, with a 578% increase in First Brand Mention. All leading to an incredible 18% revenue growth year over year, and 26% increase in traffic to Upwork.com

All this proving that innovative B2B campaigns, especially starring handsome dead people, works. So here’s to the power of great creative and reinventing a better way of working for everyone!