Over the past century, McKinsey has been helping clients with their most important opportunities; work that has forged our reputation as the leading strategic consultancy. While we’re known for our strategy work, many clients and potential clients don’t yet know that we do much more, including helping clients turn technology into real value across their organizations, which today accounts for more than 50% of the work we do.
Last year we launched the industry playbook for tech transformation, through our book “Rewired”, which details the holistic approach needed to capture value from tech. It’s rooted in the fact that ~70% of tech investments don’t provide a return because too much emphasis is put on tech alone. Our perspective is that to succeed beyond the hype, tech transformation requires a holistic approach–involving not just world-leading tech, but also bold strategy, the right operating models, and new talent, capabilities, and culture.
The job of this campaign was to translate the Rewired framework into a breakthrough marketing effort that shared our value proposition on helping clients with their technology priorities, shifted perception of McKinsey’s capabilities, and ultimately enabled growth for the firm and our clients.
To succeed, we knew we needed a top-line that broke through the crowded tech marketing landscape, and ‘stopped the scroll’ for our audiences.
We found that disruptive line in the simple but powerful: ‘Never Just Tech’.
Ultimately, our goal is always to help clients capture their biggest opportunities. Given how integral technology is to everything today, helping them embrace technology in the most effective ways is increasingly part of that work.
But we have a perception gap that needed to be addressed. While we are seen as the leader on strategy work, we are not yet seen as leaders in the tech space.
Our audience insight was that this perception gap is particularly acute with tech-related C-suite roles (e.g., CIO, CTO, CDO), who often hold a ‘veto’ over the choice of a consulting partner. So the primary goal of the campaign was to reach individuals in those roles, at large companies globally, and shift perception of McKinsey’s ability to help them on technology-related projects.
“Is this the same McKinsey?”. It’s something we hear a lot from people when they first engage with our messaging at tech events – they know the McKinsey brand well, and have strongly held views about it. Showing up in new ways is important to expand their perspectives and drive reconsideration. But it’s tough to do, and required repeated messaging across many touchpoints and settings to drive the shift.
As a firm we are also relatively new to ‘above the line’ marketing, and have a history and pride in not advertising what we do. While those views are evolving, this was our first global-scale integrated marketing campaign, and risked prompting a backlash internally if not handled thoughtfully. We needed to over-syndicate (and accept that not all colleagues would be on board!), which risked derailing the campaign or slowing down rollout. Ultimately we built the confidence of our leadership in the campaign strategy and insights, and have received almost no negative reactions internally.
The campaign reached more than 2 million qualified C-suite leaders at target organizations around the world. This was achieved by choosing tactics where we could tightly target our content to drive penetration and ultimately high-ROI, including paid social and display served to highly targeted audience groups based on 1stparty data. We also invested in in-person conferences like Salesforce’s Dreamforce, AWS’s re:Invent and Microsoft’s Ignite where we knew our audience would be, creating seamless online and offline touchpoints.
We launched multiple case studies across channels which saw far higher than average engagement on social and on our landing page (e.g., 50%+ of clicks from the landing page were to engage with case studies). And we ensured our content spoke to the audience’s context, for instance Uber ads on the way to and from tech conferences, which far exceeded all Uber benchmarks with a 4.02% swipe rate and average view time of 170 seconds.
Across paid social, webinars, events and redesigned ‘contact’ forms, we identified 700+ individuals who were highly engaged in the campaign and provided email addresses for follow-up.
More than 1,000 colleagues amplified our messaging using their own personal accounts on LinkedIn – a tactic responsible for 10.5M impressions, a huge amount of “free” media. The feedback on the campaign internally was extremely positive, and has catalyzed a real step-up in budget and resourcing in marketing campaigns in 2025.
