For 200 years, society has treated the old ways of working as sacred and unchangeable. To help euthanize that sacred cow (humanely of course), we brought a deceased CEO back from the dead to share a provocative and long overdue message: the old ways of working (in an office, 9-5, two weeks vacation) are dead and were entirely made up by people like him. So why not make up something better?

And since the only thing more memorable than a song is a song sung by a decomposing corpse, we wrote and composed an original musical performance for the launch of Upwork’s new brand platform – “This Is How We Work Now.

Beyond the 2:00 musical, the campaign includes 15 different films, including :60, :30, :15 and :06 spots in which the diseased CEO espouses the many benefits that Upwork offers, all while losing various body parts.

Despite spending millions on marketing and being a 25-year-old category-leader in the freelance marketplace, Upwork’s brand awareness with their B2B audience (large businesses, CEO’s, and hiring managers) remained extremely low.

With the momentum of the pandemic, the brief was to increase brand awareness, establish Upwork as the category leader, and get business leaders to reject the outdated hiring practices, embrace the new way of working, and tap into Upwork’s 12million global freelancers. So Upwork needed a message and campaign that would be difficult to ignore and impossible to forget.

We brought a deceased CEO back from the dead to share a provocative and long overdue message: the old ways of working (office, 9-5, 2weeks vacation) are dead and were made up by people like him. Our campaign featured a musical and shorter films to launch Upwork’s new platform – “This Is How We Work Now" while espousing Upwork’s many benefits.

The campaign was a runaway success. Despite being the category leader in remote freelance before the campaign, Upwork’s brand awareness remained more depressed than a 1950’s middle manager. Extremely low. But after our dead CEO broke the news that the old ways of working were made up by people like him, Upwork’s Unaided brand awareness increased 45% since the campaign launched. Their first mention awareness more than doubled. And Unaided Awareness with Upwork’s most important audience, large businesses, went up by a whopping 203%, with a 578% increase in First Brand Mention. All leading to an incredible 18% revenue growth year over year, and 26% increase in traffic to Upwork.com

All this proving that great commercials, especially starring handsome dead people, still work. So here’s to the power of great creative and reinventing a better way of working for everyone!

Upwork has helped businesses find top remote talent for over 20 years, and one of their biggest barriers is business leaders who are unwilling to try remote talent. They’ve been stuck in an old mindset of working.

That all changed in 2020. As a result of the pandemic, Americans had a fundamental shift in their relationship with remote and hybrid work. For nearly two years, many businesses were forced into this new way of working.

As regulations loosened, business leaders were met with a choice: continue to offer remote and hybrid work options or force everyone back to a dated looking office world mentality? This campaign was specifically built to convince business leaders that the old way of working is officially dead. Now is the time to adapt and build a new way of working with Upwork, not a time to hold on to an out-of-date way of doing things.