How LAB Created a 'Robustly Agile' Campaign for CA Technologies

Have you ever seen an elephant-hummingbird? Have you ever come across a rhino-squirrel? We have, and they’re the foundation of one of our most successful and creatively surprising projects to date.

CA Technologies, a £4.5 billion tech-industry giant, came to us looking for a digital campaign that would cut through the noise of LinkedIn and resonate with their target audience. CA’s brief was targeting high-level, elusive decision makers with a new technology. Incorporating neuro-design principles with our knowledge of human behaviour, we created a digital campaign for CA that dominated LinkedIn benchmarks.

LAB’s approach is uniquely and inherently human – entwining neuromarketing with behavioural economics and psychology to create truly emotionally engaging experiences. We push the boundaries of what it means to understand human nature through the power of creative. This innate focus on the individual led us to delve into deep persona interviews, to understand the rich psychology of motivation and beliefs of CA’s target audience.

Crucially, we discovered a disconnect in large IT infrastructures between robust and agile; decision makers believed if a solution is robust, it cannot be agile, and vice versa. This insight, the backbone of our entire creative strategy, and the application of neuro-principles drove forth a strikingly simple, oxymoronic tagline, ‘robustly agile’, designed to disrupt the target audience with cognitive dissonance.

Using this cognitive dissonance, we then developed several creative ideas that were a hybrid of robust and agile; in the process, conjuring up the elephant-hummingbird and the rhino-squirrel. Both animals were visually striking and appealing to our target audience.

In noisy and fast displays, saliency and visual pop-outs are paramount to gaining attention. The creation of stand-out graphics with blurred backgrounds to decrease attentional tradeoff, combined with subtle animation of the assets fused into a campaign that was impossible to ignore.

We used our ‘neuromarketing’ user testing to prove our neuro-design principles were applied to their full potential. We connected individuals who were representative of our target audience, to state-of-the-art equipment that enabled us to measure engagement levels, emotional states and eye movements. We ran a study to identify if our creative work would stand out in practice, not just principle, and if the fixation of gazes were where we wanted them to be: on the hybrid creatures, the tagline and the company logo. Our results were as we had predicted using our neurodesign principles, engaging the users even more than we had hoped.

Our tried and tested application of the insight we had gleaned combined with highly targeted and creative messaging and visuals enabled us to accomplish CA’s goal of cutting through the mass clutter. Together we achieved record-breaking results that transformed the performance of CA’s digital marketing campaigns.

The campaign that LAB created was the most successful one that CA ever ran. With a total of 68,000 impressions and 422 clicks, the CTR was 0.62% and the CPC was $14.13. The intended audience resonated with the campaign, resulting in a 500% increase in CTR (compared to CA’s best performance until the ‘Robustly Agile’ campaign).

Beyond the numbers, the campaign allowed teams both client side and agency side to really get stimulated creatively. The project that liberated and inspired our team became one of our most enjoyable ones to date, as it allowed us to get extremely involved - from composing music and imagining what an ‘Ele-bird’ would sound like (which you can hear in the video) to applying our consumer neuroscience insights to create truly emotionally engaging creative.