Medius tackled white collar fraud with a podcast, here's how
Medius and Fight or Flight have won the Audio category at The Drum Awards for B2B. Here is the award-winning case study.
Check the award-winning campaign here.
Despite a huge rise in white-collar fraud, many businesses still underestimate it. This was a challenge for Medius, a B2B provider of anti-fraud software to finance professionals. How do you sell fraud prevention to a buyer who thinks fraud is something that happens to somebody else? Persuading buyers to invest in Medius’s clever software would first require them to believe fraud is a credible threat and second to believe it could have a material impact on their business.
STRATEGY
Buyers were underestimating the scale of financial fraud. Reaching them outside the traditional finance and accounting channels would help create the impression that the problem was bigger than they realized. But Medius needed to do more than communicate the rational benefits of its anti-fraud software. Potential buyers had to be reached emotionally, to provoke them into seeing Medius as an essential purchase. The solution? A hard-hitting, moving story that was impossible to forget, in the form of a True Crime podcast, a mass audience channel most B2B brands would never touch. The podcast, Accounts Deceivable, examined the human cost of financial fraud, asking the question: what does it take to commit a white-collar crime? And what does it feel like for victims to lose millions of dollars of company money? To help take our story wider, Fight or Flight pitched case studies from the podcast series to the nationals and also commissioned research to examine how employees felt about white-collar crime. Nearly half of respondents worried that fraud was being treated too leniently by law enforcement. That headline provided our campaign with a string of tier one national hits, including the Sun and Mirror. Fight or Flight went to great lengths to ensure content quality. We recorded the podcast series on location in London, Los Angeles, Houston, Washington DC and San Francisco, scouting interviewees from both sides of the story, including one fraudster who conned a petrochemicals firm out of $13 million and a non-profit director who unwittingly gave $650,000 of charity finances to a cyber criminal. Persuading both victims and fraudsters to participate was a real coup for the show – typically neither are comfortable talking on the record.
Creating a hit podcast from scratch is extremely tough. Apple alone lists 2 million competing shows. Fight or Flight worked with accountancy influencer James Wright, who produced videos promoting Accounts Deceivable across Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. This helped to drive downloads among our target audience of finance professionals and introduce Medius to a broader audience. We also created a number of social audiograms, featuring emotive clips from the show. These were posted organically on Medius-owned channels, timed to launch new episodes and drive more brand association for Medius.
RESULTS
Accounts Deceivable smashed its main objective, introducing a giant audience of finance professionals to Medius’s anti-fraud software. Delivering these high engagement numbers on channels our audience wouldn’t typically visit for work was an important way of showing them that fraud was a bigger problem than they realized. The True Crime format not only delivered a big audience for Medius’s messages, it also wrapped those messages in a compelling and addictive story, ensuring 89% of listeners listened right to the end (a crucial metric given the importance of delivering embedded advertising messages throughout). The campaign also drove tier one coverage of an important story about the rise of white-collar crime, at a time when a rise in the cost of living is making life unaffordable – and fraud more enticing.
THE NUMBERS
Podcast
- A top 150 Apple business podcast, ranking alongside CNBC and Harvard Business Review: an astonishing achievement for a niche B2B brand
- 23,500+ downloads, inside the top 20% of shows across all categories (not just business)
- 96% of the audience featured within key markets of the UK + US
- Average episode consumption of 89%
Print, online, and social
- Campaign reach of 1.15bn
- A string of tier one media coverage driven by case studies and dedicated research, including the Sun, Mirror, Independent, Daily Star, Daily Express, MSN
- A strong collection of B2B hits in key finance and accounting trades, including International Banker, Wealth and Finance News, Financial IT, and ERP Today
Commercial Podcast listeners were three times as likely to register their data on the Medius website, connecting brand communications to lead generation.