Latest campaigns and real thought leadership examples: Spring 2022

From cybersecurity and digitalisation to people and the employee experience, recent thought leadership releases have covered a lot of ground. As always, below you will find inspiring examples of real thought leadership from FT Longitude and our partners from the last three months.

Alternatively you can check out last quarter’s campaign launches here, or if you’d rather talk to one of the team about any of these topics, please get in touch — we’d be delighted to tell you more and help you find ways to innovate with your next campaign.

Professional Services perspectives

Shaping the future of digitalization
Eversheds Sutherland
Thomas Sturge, Group Editor

Businesses are forecast to spend $10 trillion over a five-year period on digital transformation. Digitalization is game-changing, but it comes with risks, challenges and obligations. Law firm, Eversheds Sutherland, knows they are in a prime position to help their partners tackle the myriad of complex laws and regulatory responsibilities across the globe related to digital responsibility for companies.

In order to best demonstrate this expertise, Eversheds engaged FT Longitude to carry out a fact-finding mission. This strategy work helped advise the brief of a major thought leadership initiative to allow the firm to showcase what they already know: that digitalization must be business imperative to deal with these risks and challenges. The resulting campaign included the key findings from a survey of 700 senior executives on the uptake of digital technologies, future strategies, mergers and acquisitions activities, and much more.

ACTIVATE: Released as a comprehensive compendium of external and internal knowledge on the topic, the downloadable digital assets produced by FT Longitude and Eversheds are showcased on their global homepage, and stand out as a new go-to source of legal insight on digitalization and corporate digital responsibility.

Long Term Value and Corporate Governance Survey
EY
Peter Elkins, Group Editor

Whilst it is clear that employees, consumers and the general public expect organisations to be addressing ESG priorities and opportunities, a survey of 200 corporate directors shows executives are as passionate about making a difference to the planet, as well as building their companies’ resilience and long-term value.

On top of providing a route to greater risk resilience, EY and FT Longitude’s latest report shows executives believe that ESG is, above all, a major commercial and growth opportunity. For leading companies, it will be a route to innovation across products, services and even business models, allowing them to shape the future of their industry and stay a step ahead of disruption.

ACTIVATE: The report is hosted as a chapterised scrolling format on EY.com, with the digital download available for those wanting to dive deeper. Nine senior interviewees, including the CEOs of Siemens Energy and ING, lend their unrivalled insight, showcasing the power of quantitative and qualitative research in partnership.

​​Avoiding the perils of the transformation
Addleshaw Goddard
Thomas Sturge, Group Editor

In the latest FT Focus report, Addleshaw Goddard and FT Longitude partnered to examine the current executive sentiment towards business transformation. A survey of 250 of these business leaders found that whilst transformation projects are generally a business priority, a worrying number still fail, with legal and regulatory challenges seen as the main sticking point.

The report itself attempts to lend a helping hand to these companies, highlighting the six current trends in business transformation, the risks and opportunities associated with those trends, and four practical measures to help mitigate those risks. With the Financial Times and Addelshaw Goddard front and centre, the two brands have been able to restart the conversation around transformation risks, and re-lay the path towards smoother transformation projects in the future.

ACTIVATE: As well as Addleshaw Goddard’s own audience, the Financial Times was able to reach their brand’s unrivalled audience of senior business leaders from around the globe with FT-hosted content and advertising.

Fresh insights from Financial Services

Assets That Matter
Financial Times
Sean Kearns, Editor-in-chief

Amid rising costs and industry consolidation, asset managers must narrow their focus. ‘Talent’ and ‘growth’ are now the watchwords of the moment. A survey by the Financial Times and FT Longitude shows that these two objectives dominate the industry: first, a headlong rush towards greater sustainability in investment and growth, and second, a more diverse workforce in terms of experience and environmental, social and governance (ESG) and data skills.

FT Longitude surveyed 232 investment professionals worldwide, and found that firms are indeed looking to the future in actioning these two themes, even as they manage the continuing fallout from the pandemic. But whilst this is seen as a positive move from asset management firms, there is still cause for concern from many angles.

ACTIVATE: These causes for concern, and the Financial Times’ unrivalled insight and advice in tackling them, are taken to market in a slick PDF report produced by FT Longitude’s expert in-house design team. The key findings are hosted on a landing-page style microsite that focuses on the highlights from the survey and interviews to draw in its audience.

Thought leading in Pharma

How to deliver sustainable access to innovative cancer care in emerging markets
MSD
Laura Adcock, Group Editor

As new cancer therapies become available, even the best-resourced healthcare systems need to make decisions about how to provide access, and the challenge is particularly acute in developing economies. To lend their insight, pharmaceutical company MSD partnered with FT Longitude on a new series of insightful content aimed at helping tackle that problem.

Speaking with a number of global experts in the field, FT Longitude developed insights based on three specific countries in which these issues have been tackled head-on: South Africa, Indonesia, and the UAE. These case studies highlighted innovative services and partnerships, as well as the difficulties faced with balancing the need to innovate, and the need to provide more sustainable access.

ACTIVATE: MSD’s fresh new thought leadership approach is hosted in its own microsite developed by FT Longitude, allowing the audience to explore all the insights under one roof, without distraction.

Trending in tech

The Great Data Acceleration
Fujitsu
Hannah Stubbings, Senior Editor

The events that have unfurled since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic have shown businesses how vital it is to be digital and data-driven. Fujitsu knows that business success now depends on the ability to process data and make quick decisions based on that analysis. In order to lead this conversation with real conviction, Fujitsu needed original research to back up their words.

Working with FT Longitude, a survey of over 500 C-suite executives informed a thought leadership campaign designed to provide Fujitsu with the impact needed to make a splash on the topic of data acceleration. What did the survey find? That the time for acceleration is now, and future performance depends on investment now.

ACTIVATE: FT Longitude’s editorial team helped develop a marketable narrative to help the client’s team take these insights to market. Following Fujitsu’s fresh brand guidelines, FT Longitude’s expert design team then constructed a microsite to house the story, survey data, and insights from a number of interviews with those C-suite leaders.

Three steps to superior cyber security
Kaspersky Labs
Hannah Stubbings, Senior Editor

The threat of cybersecurity weighs heavily on enterprises now more than ever. Gartner data say new ransomware models alone are the biggest emerging risk organizations face today — bigger than the pandemic and supply chain disruption.

But to back up their own expertise in cybersecurity, Kaspersky Labs needed their own thought leadership for their client-facing teams to use. In partnership with FT Longitude and the Financial Times, Kaspersky surveyed 750 leaders at enterprises around the world, and interviewed several key experts including group chief information security risk officer at Standard Chartered, Darren Argyle, about their approach to cyber security. Among the data, FT Longitude found that nearly two thirds of business leaders think that a more diverse and inclusive cyber security team will be vital in the coming years.

ACTIVATE: The insights from the survey are hosted on a content hub on FT.com, allowing Kaspersky Labs to access the most senior business audience in the world organically, and through advertising across the network.

Unlocking the Secrets of Hybrid Cloud Leaders
Fujitsu
Hannah Stubbings, Senior Editor

Fujitsu knows the tangible benefit of leading in the early and thorough adoption of hybrid cloud, but there are challenges. In order to prove that the benefits far outweigh those challenges, and provide actionable solutions to aid their partners, Fujitsu engaged FT Longitude to approach a thought leadership campaign rooted in trusted, quantitative research.

A global study of 300 CIOs and IT professionals around the world highlighted a number of ‘Hybrid Cloud Leaders’ and the four pillars of success they focus on. A strategy built on these four pillars is found to be a huge accelerator for adopter organisations, facilitating migration and mitigating risks.

ACTIVATE: Hosted on a standalone hub, the insights and data have the chance to better contribute to the overall story and narrative, without distraction from elsewhere. The data itself is displayed with clarity and interactivity, making the research investment work harder for Fujitsu.

Visionary thinking in Industrials

The Big Worklife Reboot
​​Sodexo
Meg Wright, Senior Editor and Head of Audio

As employees contemplate a new working future, free from the shackles of traditional structures and processes, leaders should pay attention and align their approaches with evolving needs, recalibrating food solutions, workspaces, and employee experiences in order to attract, engage, and retain them.

Sodexo’s study of 4,800 employees, conducted by Harris Interactive, gathered insight on how to navigate challenges as you lead your teams into tomorrow. FT Longitude’s expert editorial team took these findings to help construct the report, The Big Worklife Reboot, to provide actionable feedback to help companies create a better worklife experience.

ACTIVATE: Full of insightful data, expert perspectives and effective storytelling, the flagship report positions Sodexo as the true thought leader in post-pandemic employee engagement, and provides their client-facing teams with the tools they need to have ground-breaking commercial conversations.

Pioneering minds to redefine the future
Brunel
Rob Mitchell, CEO and Co-founder

Companies need people with the right blend of technical and business skills to deal with the transformation associated with changing future demand. Perhaps nowhere is that more certain than in industries such as Oil and Gas, Mining, Renewables and Life Sciences.

Brunel, a specialist recruiter to these industries aims to tackle the challenge of finding these skills head on. But Brunel’s survey of senior executives in these industries, commissioned by FT Longitude, finds their focus is often on firefighting, not future proofing.

ACTIVATE: To provide a platform for Brunel to commentate on these issues around recruitment, FT Longitude designed and built an online hub to house the findings from the survey. Interviews with the firm’s CEO Jilko Andringa, and MD Tania Sinibaldi, allowed Brunel to better share their industry-leading insight on the quantitative findings and bolster the thought leadership narrative.

The Employee Experience Gets Flexible
Sodexo
Meg Wright, Senior Editor and Head of Audio

Being an industry leader in workplace services, Sodexo has a unique view on the changing employee experience as the world recovers from the Covid pandemic. To help highlight their expertise, developing a thought leadership perspective with engaging content was vital, helping to talk to their partners whatever stage of the commercial process they occupied.

The report, developed by FT Longitude expert writers, investigates how flexibility is reshaping the employee experience and where employers should focus their efforts to understand and meet employees’ expectations of the new worklife experience, helping their partners build an engaged and motivated workforce.

ACTIVATE: The report helps showcase data from various quantitative sources, Sodexo and otherwise, as well as several senior expert perspectives from those inside Sodexo itself including Sharon Findlay, Global SVP Human Resources.