From investment banking and providing capital and access to markets to giving advice and managing risk, Capital Markets is a relationship-driven business. The average sales cycle is between 18 months to three years. In Canada, BMO is one of the big five banks and a household name. In the U.S., the BMO Capital Markets brand is unknown and is a small spend player compared to bigger, more established U.S. competitors. BMO wants to be the bank of choice for Capital Markets.

B2B advertising mainly works by building and refreshing memory links to the brand ready to activate when buyers have a need. And, if our advertising is better at building brand relevant memories then our brand becomes more competitive. To do that, we have to build a connection to our brand over the long-term by efficiently distributing timely and relevant thought leadership content for institutional investors in their digital journey.

"We Work Here" was developed as a expertise-driven, overarching brand platform to unify the message and build equity in a consistent long-term idea and avoid fragmentation. The goal was simply to give institutional investors what they want: credible, thought-provoking, timely thought leadership content distributed digitally. By proving our expertise goes deep, we hoped to gain investors’ trust and encourage them to consider BMO. The creative featured an icon of a BMO branded flag, to visually demonstrate our expertise and promote brand recognition. To keep the campaign fresh, generate interest, and provide context, the flag – and corresponding ad copy – was featured in different and surprising ways. Dedicated B2B content and advertising teams were assembled to build a proprietary custom content advertising framework that would cut through to create brand awareness and engagement using a journey-based, holistic media strategy to intercept our target audience with content-based digital and social advertising.

Earning trust and credibility with B2B decision-makers requires strong thought leadership, especially if you’re not an established market leader. 65% say thought leadership significantly changed the perception of a company for the better, however, 71% say that less than half of the thought leadership they consume gives them valuable insights and 55% say if a piece doesn’t capture their attention in the first minute, they move on. Institutional investors are hungry for knowledge. Long-term guidance and advice impacts trust so, content quality, relevance and timeliness is most important. We curated a content roadmap to provide investors with valuable insights to help them navigate the pandemic and beyond. We validated the roadmap using a LinkedIn whitespace analysis to ensure the content would be in the sweet spot of uncommon and engaging. We used a data-driven, digital/social strategy to deliver the right message to the right audience in the right moment.

The content roadmap reflected an editorial red thread of #RoadToRecovery (2020-2021) and #DefineTheFuture (2022) and highlighted our experts, growth sectors, and leading capabilities. Thirty-three content pieces covered topics including macroeconomics, electronic trading, corporate treasury, food and agriculture, ESG, retail, mergers and acquisitions and supply chain. The campaign featured short and long-form articles and episodes from our Markets Plus and award-winning Sustainability Leaders podcasts. Ads were developed around the content “so-what” factor to extract the key value proposition in a provoking, pithy, and professional way to break through the digital clutter. A data-driven media strategy including first-party data for contact level targeting and building lookalikes was used with in-market, contextual and affinity audiences June 2020-November 2022. Media placements included podcasts, display, native, YouTube, search, publisher sites, and LinkedIn. Each piece received 100% share of voice for three weeks in the U.S. priority footprint markets of New, Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, San Francisco.

Exceeded in Nielsen Media Analytics Brand Attributes impact:

• +26% above benchmark "Can help clients navigate the pandemic and beyond."

• +23% above benchmark "Has the capability to deliver high quality advice."

• +22% above benchmark "Has the capability to be a strategic partner in good and uncertain times."

• +16% above benchmark "Provides expert insights."

BMO engaged our target audience driving over one million unique visitors, that spent over 41,000 hours consuming our content to inform how they adapted to an ever-changing landscape.

Exceeded Average Time Spent reading content vs. benchmark* of 2:12

• 4:07 (2020)

• 4:24 (2021)

• 5:27 (2022)

*Contently Financial Services Content Report 2019: Industry Benchmarks Institutional Finance.

We punched well above our weight against the bigger U.S. competition. Achieved top box LinkedIn Content Marketing Scores vs. 10 U.S. competitors 2021-2022:

July 2020 ranked #10 > July 2021 ranked #1 > July 2022 ranked #2