Objective

RSA, a leading commercial insurer, commissioned a report raising awareness of the risks facing SMEs. The audience was split and awkward: internal stakeholders and staff on one side, brokers and small businesses on the other. The same material had to hold attention in a boardroom and in an inbox.

Risk research is easy to publish and hard to get read. The brief was, in practice, a distribution problem wearing a report's clothes.

Creative response

The RSA campaign sat inside that function: the “Future Impacts” visual theme, the bespoke illustration set, the report design and the digital assets cut from it were produced in-house.

• A named visual theme. “Future Impacts”, a bespoke identity for the campaign rather than a corporate template, built on futuristic imagery.
• Bespoke illustration. Custom illustration throughout, in place of stock photography, giving the research a look nothing else in the category had.
• The report. Original research designed into a single flagship document.
• Digital asset set. The report broken down into components and distributed across RSA's owned channels, so the research travelled in pieces as well as whole.

The structural decision was to treat the illustration system as the campaign's distribution mechanism, not its decoration, every asset pulled from the same visual world, which is what made a fragmented rollout still read as one campaign.

Results

SABRE 2017, certificate of excellence, best use of photography and illustration

OWNED, distribution ran through RSA's own channels, not paid reach

The work as very well received by RSA and its audiences, and credits the campaign activity with helping achieve the first-month download figure.

Downloads are the only hard number. None of that should be upgraded into a claim without a fresh source.

The work

A key part of what we required from the Future Impacts campaign Cicero developed was a striking and impactful theme that would run through the whole campaign. The space concept fits very well with our ambitions and moved the tone and vision of our output to the next level. … It was one of the best-received pieces of marketing collateral the business has received in recent years.

Hilary Douglas, Head of Media and Public Affairs, RSA

Recognition

Certificate of excellence, 2017 SABRE Awards, for best use of photography and illustration. downloaded over 20,000 times in its first month.