Winner: Hudson Highland Group and Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide
Campaign: Creating the "Leading Economic Indicator's Indicator"
Hudson Highland Group was a new company in a competitive landscape: human resources-related professional service firms. The global professional staffing and executive search
firm lacked brand positioning, identity, cohesion and visibility in a realm populated by big players with notable reputations, among them Korn/Ferry, Spencer Stuart and Manpower.
So HHG set out to create its own image.
Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide looked for ways that HHG could differentiate itself with its knowledge of trends in the employment space. It then created a vehicle for
messaging to convey HHG's perspective on national employment market trends. Ogilvy PR helped HHG create and launch the first measure of employee workplace perceptions: the Hudson
Employment Index. Then, it pursued coverage in national and regional media to promote visibility and assembled a team of media ambassadors from HHG to serve as spokespeople,
positioning the Index in the most effective ways.
Each month, the Hudson Employment Index uses one of the largest samples of the country's working population to conduct more than 9,000 telephone interviews with employees
nationwide. The Index collects the most accurate reading of employee's feelings about the job market and correlates data on employer hiring plans, job security and personal
finances. It measures employee confidence by age, gender, race, marital status, compensation levels and other key divisions. Based on the success of the local data in 2004, Ogilvy
PR added six markets for a total of 11 and additional demographic breakdowns for the start of 2005. Rasmussen Reports, LLC, an independent research firm, compiles the data
monthly.
A combination of press releases, a Web site (the Hudson Employment Index Web site shares data within the company, as well as providing HHG executives with a communication tool
for business development) and online graphical media kit joined strategic partnerships with business organizations to achieve the desired results. More than 9.7 billion combined
total audience figures for Hudson Employment Index coverage were the result, and the Index has gained status as the leading indicators' indicator. The Index now receives monthly
Reuters coverage calling attention to it as a possible precursor to the monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
Honorable Mentions
Telework: Virtually Working in the Federal Government: O'Keeffe & Company, Inc., CDW Government, Inc. Remote access solutions-provider CDW Government and O'Keeffe &
Company benchmarked the state of teleworking - using computers to work outside the office - and increased awareness of federal telework requirements with a survey program
targeting federal employees. Awareness of the telework option increased 3 percent in just 60 days.
Procter & Gamble and Delahaye : Making the PR-to-Sales Connection P&G and Delahaye applied marketing mix modeling to quantify the extent to which PR promotes awareness
of the company's brands, as well as the degree to which PR drives sales. The method worked, showing that PR-based influencer marketing efficiently delivered high levels of return,
often surpassing the ROI of mass-market advertising and other standard methods.
May The Workforce Be With You: Kitchen Public Relations and Spherion Corporation Spherion, a staffing and recruiting company, wanted to boost the image of its employment
survey, the Spherion Report. Kitchen PR opted to release the survey on the same day the Bureau of Labor Statistics unveiled its monthly report. The resulting link between
Sperhion's numbers and those of the BLS gave Spherion better media credibility and made it one of the key sources in its field, boosting Spherion's business results.