The Week
The Week attracted its largest sponsor in the magazine’s history, and Dell won a Bronze ad award for Innovation in Media with Emerging Leaders: Tomorrow’s CEOs, based on our primary and secondary research.
The Week magazine was looking to create a branded study that identified the likely CEOs of tomorrow and revealed their attitudes and opinions on today’s crucial business issues. The Week partnered with Beresford Research hoping to boost business readership and attract a sponsor.
Beresford Research exceeded The Week’s goals. Not only did we:
- create an intellectually stimulating Emerging Leader Study that drew in new readers,
- generate advertising dollars, and
- create compelling intellectual capital.
Our Emerging Leaders Study enabled The Week to land its most significant sponsorship. And Dell was feted by the ad industry for the results. A win-win-win!
In 2011 Dell was at a crossroad. It had become a major player in business technology services and wanted to expand awareness and support the Dell brand as appropriate for business customers as well as consumers.
Dell partnered with The Week magazine for a unique multimedia marketing campaign, Emerging Leaders. Beresford Research designed the methodology and carried out the primary and secondary research. We identified 10-year trends in CEO recruitment and created a list of 2,000 Emerging Leaders: CEOs of Tomorrow. Beresford Research then interviewed the leaders on a variety of business topics. The results became the basis for a content-rich microsite housed at theweek.com/emergingleaders, custom content adjacent to Dell print brand ads in The Week magazine, and a leadership event in New York.
Dell won a Bronze in the Annual Internationalist Awards for Innovation in Media for its unique multimedia market Emerging Leaders campaign.
“In the first five weeks of the campaign, the Emerging Leaders microsite generated nearly 100,000 pageviews and an above-average clickthrough rate of .29%. Over 70% viewed the campaign as informative, and are more likely to seek further information about the content.”
Links to the materials are no longer available on the Web. Here’s a brief overview of our research:
The Emerging Leaders Study first looked at the skills and functional backgrounds of more than 1,000 new CEOs taking office in S&P 500 companies in 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008 – 2010. This analysis – in addition to trends drawn from previously published work – uncovered the attributes, experience, and background of today’s corporate leaders to determine who would likely become tomorrow’s CEOs.
We conducted the study in two phases. Phase one created a database of new CEOs at S&P 500 companies over the last decade and explicitly focused on any differences among the new CEOs since 2008. Phase two applied the attributes gleaned from trend analysis to identify the 2,000 executives most likely to emerge as CEO candidates from a pool of over 8,000 executives. Additionally, to provide rich qualitative information to complement the Phase One findings, we interviewed 39 senior executives among “The Week 2000 Emerging Leaders.”
