• by Larissa Faw , November 12, 2014

Most companies celebrate their anniversaries by looking back over past accomplishments, but Alger, a global asset manager based in New York City, is using its 50th as an opportunity to look forward and examine what the next 50 years will look like. Developed with New York-based branding and creative agency Zambrelli + Partners, with media duties handled by Tomorro///, the “Think Further” campaign shares ideas on what life may be like in 2064 in three particular growth industries: medicine, energy, and technology. 

The "Conversations with Tomorrow" short documentary film series on the Think Further website  features a future thinker in each sector: Dr. Daniel Kraft, who explains the impact of critical developments in the future of medicine; Professor Donald R. Sadoway, who explains how to create renewable, sustainable energy solutions for the entire planet; and technologist Dr. Jennifer Healey, who looks at the future of affective technology. 

The campaign will run for three months, with a different film highlighted each month. Alger is also using an array of advertising, PR, and social media to promote the campaign. The outreach includes programmatic advertising (static and video-embedded banner ads), native advertising on sites such as Institutional Investor and Morningstar, advertising via Taboola/Outbrain video networks, mobile advertising (including geo-targeting), LinkedIn (promoted posts, email blasts), SEM (Google AdWords and paid searches on Bing), and promoted social media posts (Twitter and LinkedIn). 

Despite the initiative's heavy utilization of social media, these channels represented a key challenge for the asset management company. "Implementing a social media campaign was a first for our company," says Jeanne Sdroulas, senior vice president and head of marketing for Alger.  "The financial services industry is highly regulated. As such, many financial firms, including ours, have not done much in terms of social media. We learned that we needed to both educate and promote social media at the same time with our employees and senior management."