Women are consistently reaching new heights in business—but they still face specific, complex challenges when it comes to career advancement. While the gender gap is narrowing, the collective rate of progress has slowed. The UN’s Global Gender Gap Report found that without a bold push forward, it will take 134 years to reach gender parity.
To be part of that push forward, Morning Brew Inc., Delta Air Lines, and The Female Quotient partnered up on an integrated branded content campaign that explored the nuances of womens’ career paths and offered tools to support their advancement. Our goal was to bring data-driven, actionable insights to the conversation about what’s helping women elevate at work and what’s holding them back.
This partnership ladders up to Delta Air Lines’ “Closing the Gap” initiative, which focuses on narrowing the gaps between frontline and corporate employees. Showcasing diverse groups through inclusive content is one of the many ways they’re closing these gaps.
Both Morning Brew Inc. and The Female Quotient were uniquely suited to deliver this message with Delta Air Lines; Morning Brew Inc. has been covering the evolving business landscape for nearly 10 years. And with women making up half of their audience, MBI has continuously produced content that helps women navigate their careers. The Female Quotient has the largest global community of women in business, creating experiences that connect women and driving a constant conversation around gender equity. Together, these two brands helped position Delta Air Lines as the world’s most inclusive airline.
The Making Your Connection campaign started with a custom, in-depth survey built in close collaboration with Delta Air Lines. We leveraged the award-winning Morning Brew Breakroom community and The Female Quotient audience to uncover the experiences and challenges for women in today’s workplace—exploring tactics for getting ahead, uncovering the impact of mentorship, and reexamining the “prime” age for professional women. We received over 800 responses from our combined audiences.
A key consideration after gathering all this data was how we used it to inform and build the campaign. Advice content tailored specifically for women is a saturated space, so getting the right media mix was crucial in ensuring the campaign actually reached the readers who were most in need of these insights. After careful consideration, we leveraged three key strategies to communicate our message: data-driven visuals, gamification, and first-hand narratives.
Using those strategies and our survey insights, we created a first-to-market content hub. It included:
Each element of the content hub was informed by different data points from our survey and offers tangible tools for audience members who may be facing similar challenges or opportunities. Both individually and as a whole, they offer a toolkit for women navigating modern work environments, complete with perspective, insights, and advice.
In addition to the content hub, we created four dedicated email sends to our audience promoting the articles across different MBI franchises, and the content was promoted across both Morning Brew and The Female Quotient’s newsletters and social media.
Following the launch of the Making Your Connection campaign, Kamaria Morgan, Delta’s General Manager of Global Media, said, “We are thrilled by the strong performance of this partnership and are proud that this meaningful project resonated so strongly with the women we created it for. We know transparency and openness are key to closing the gender gap and we continue to be committed to building a more diverse workplace and world.”
Performance-wise, each piece of content we created significantly outperformed Morning Brew Inc. audience benchmarks. The quiz saw an 80% completion rate, with click-through rates (CTR) ranging from 2% to 44% across all branded articles. The average CTR across all four dedicated email sends averaged 3%, which is 2x higher than our benchmark. The campaign garnered 44m total impressions, which was a 10% overdelivery and double what was contracted across written content.
And while overdelivery on any campaign is, in itself, a successful result, we couldn't help but smile when we heard responses from the very audience we intended to support: our women readers. Comments like: “Thank you for doing this” and “I love this. Small steps mean big progress; we each have to do our part to spread awareness, share resources and create space to increase opportunities and foster professional growth for women in business."
Reading that feedback, we knew we'd found a unique space in the market for actionable, insightful, data-driven content designed to do what we always aim to—engage the next generation of business leaders.
