Targeting personalities to raise awareness for Slack

Summary

With a small digital budget against competition of tech giants all with deep rooted awareness, plus much-deeper pockets we needed to be smart in our targeting to effectively cut through. While Slack users do not have a unifying job title, company structure or background, IBM Watson personality profiling told us they do have a distinct and unifying personality profile, which we targeted through media. By targeting office workers based on their personality traits we successfully increased aided brand awareness from 12% – 21%, an increase of 75% in those exposed to the digital campaign, which far surpassed industry benchmarks.

Challenge

Slack is the fastest growing business application in history, however facing increased competition from trusted tech giants, such as Google, Facebook & Microsoft, Slack wanted to raise its awareness to establish its positing as a leading player across European markets.

With a small digital budget we needed to be smart in our targeting to effectively cut through the giant competitor budgets. This meant the blanket ‘office worker’ target wasn’t enough. Instead, we needed to focus our budget on reaching the most relevant and influential people who could drive adoption of Slack.

Solution

We pulled online discourse of people talking about Slack and ran the text through IBM Watson’s Personality Insights API, an industry leading Natural Language Processing tool to map out specific personality traits of Slack users according to OCEAN personality dimensions. The research showed that openness and neuroticism were strong, clear and consistently defining traits of a typical Slack user.

By partnering with visual DNA we were able to apply these personality learnings by targeting our UK digital campaign to people indexing highly on openness and neuroticism. We supported our digital media throughout with our offline TV, press and OOH campaigns and ensured our press and digital environments were in-line with the personality traits (e.g. intellectual press titles).

Results

Results show that we successfully grew awareness of Slack between those exposed and non-exposed from 12% to 21%, an increase of 75%, surpassing our objective of 50% increase. These results far surpass expected Millward Brown prompted awareness uplift norms of 3 to 4%.

“Total Media’s behavioural analysis and psycho-graphic targeting led to a well-calculated media approach. Our brand message reached the right audience through the right touch points, and we doubled brand awareness numbers across all markets. Fantastic foundational campaign and results!” Rob Klein, Associate Marketing Manager, Slack