This year, VSAers are embarking on an ambitious journey to redesign logos, websites, apps, packaging and more. It’s our contribution to businesses, brands and society by exploring potential solutions to the many types of expressions and experiences in the world we think have the potential of being better. We have not been commissioned for these solutions, but rather it’s our passion for great creativity that motivates us.
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In some instances, we’ll be considering what exists today. At other times, we’ll consider the opportunity for something yet to be solved, but we see it as critical for the future.
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Visit design4better.co to see the ever-evolving sketchpad for ambitious concepts that push design and organizations forward. From bold ideas to new interactions, we create with curiosity and purpose.
We’re thrilled to share that VSA took home a 2025 ANA REGGIE Award for our work with FactSet on the “Not Just the Facts” campaign. The REGGIEs—one of the most respected honors in brand activation—celebrate bold, creative campaigns that drive real business results.
“Not Just the Facts” flipped the B2B script by injecting some much-needed personality into financial services marketing. With help from our production partner Thinking Machine, we created a campaign that humorously called out the overload of data without context—making the case for FactSet’s unique ability to deliver insights that actually matter. The result was a 280% increase in brand awareness, a 438% increase in marketing qualified leads and a 76% increase in consideration.
This win is a testament to what happens when brave clients and creative teams push the boundaries of what B2B can be. Here’s to making smart ideas stand out—and to saying no to boring B2B advertising.
Companies don’t always use data to power their brand positioning shifts. Often, it’s a subjective exercise that reflects what internal stakeholders are experiencing when they interact with customers.
That subjectivity can be dangerous for brand positioning work because it can root your brand in promises and messaging that won’t last over the long haul and may not reflect the needs of high-value growth targets.
When clients come to VSA for brand positioning work, we usually suggest their brand positioning journey start with Promise to Performance®, our proprietary quantitative research methodology.
Promise to Performance (P2P) was specifically designed to identify the key ingredients of a brand positioning that is true to your business, relevant to your customers and different from what your competitors are saying. In other words, it’s everything you need, and nothing that you don’t.
P2P provides the answers to three key questions that will help you prioritize the brand promises you should focus on in your brand positioning:
In this piece, let’s focus on promise alignment to high-value audiences—why we approach it the way we do and why it matters for brand growth. We’ll cover the other two areas in future pieces.
Our approach starts with prioritizing across a long list of potential needs—about 20 unique statements, on average—to find out which are most important to each respondent in the survey. The need statements are custom written for each study to capture a range of functional and emotional needs that represent different potential priorities within your particular audience.
We then use need segmentation to define the audience cluster groups. With any segmentation exercise, there are typically foundational needs that all segments identify as important for the category. These needs are important to be competitive in the category—so it’s important to have them covered—but they are not usually differentiating.
Here’s an example: We worked with a company that offers a technology solution for small businesses. First, we surveyed their total audience, and then we performed a need cluster analysis to reveal audience segments with different priorities representing unique mindsets. In this case, all SMB segments have similar reliability and service need priorities.
One of the big benefits of doing need-based segmentation is that it can uncover the hidden gems. These are the needs that don’t immediately rise to the top in overall audience ranking of importance, but they can actually carry outsized weight for certain audiences.
For a differentiated position, we want to isolate those needs that are uniquely important to different customer segments, and then act on them.
On average we find about 4.0 segments with each study, and each segment has an average of about 3.6 needs that shape that segment—meaning, they are both important to the segment and more important for that segment compared to the audience as a whole. Often, segment-defining needs are lower ranking overall, but they over-index in importance for a particular segment. In fact, when we looked back across our P2P studies, we found that 82% of segments have at least one middle-of-the-pack need. And 45% had at least two.
Take our SMB technology provider’s audiences. You can see that some of their needs are foundational to all audiences, and some are unique to just that segment. All segments believe that reliability and great customer service are important, but within each segment there are more nuanced needs that define that particular audience.
Based on these defining needs for each segment, we can now align product capabilities, brand strengths and other reasons to believe to inform both our positioning and our messaging to the opportunity segments.
And in fact, you shouldn’t try to be. As brand marketers face tighter budgets and scrutiny over returns, you need to focus your energy where it will have the most impact. Segmenting your audience based on needs allows you to see which ones have the highest potential for growth and which ones you should deprioritize because they don’t align with the category white space and what your company can deliver.
The risk of overlooking some of the middle-of-the-pack needs becomes particularly impactful when those needs are priorities for your high-value segments. That means more likely than not, there’s something important to your high-value target that’s lurking below the surface.
Back to our technology provider example: Of the four segments, we found that two of the groups (Control Seekers and Tech Skeptics) provided no opportunity for growth at all because of their complacent mindsets toward technology.
And then we found that one additional segment (Customer Advocates) was important but wouldn’t provide the kind of growth the company was looking for.
The fourth segment (Edge Seekers) was where the real opportunity was, and where the company could focus its positioning to accelerate growth. This is a group that (1) has one-third of the market size at 36% and (2) is actively seeking a technology that can grow its business. Both the segment’s size and its mindset make it ripe for growth—and a prime audience to focus on for positioning.
This approach yields more precise, differentiated positioning that will stand out from a sea of vague brand generalities, as well as ensure that the brand is focused on the places where it stands to gain the most. You don’t need to ignore your lower-growth audiences, but you can write positioning that primarily focuses on the accelerator groups while still appealing to the lower-priority audiences.
One of the best parts of P2P is how actionable it is.
After we identify our segments, we then build profiles of these different audience members that includes their needs and how to talk to them. These profiles easily onboard your marketing and sales teams to craft messaging that speaks directly to the things these prioritized audiences care about most. Using these audience profiles, you can also relate the need-based segments to other “addressable” audience profiles that your teams are using, which can serve as a great complement to demographic segmentations.
If you’d like to work with a partner that can identify the key ingredients of a brand positioning that is unique, ownable and aligned to your audience’s core needs, we’d love to hear from you. You can get in touch here to learn more about P2P and how it can work for your business.
FactSet, a global financial digital platform and enterprise solutions provider, has partnered with Chicago-based creative agency VSA Partners to unveil a second round of spots in its “Not Just the Facts” campaign. The campaign originally launched in April this year with impressive results.
The campaign was built on a core strategic insight: While quality data is critical for financial professionals, facts in isolation provide little value. FactSet’s personalization, data connectivity, open and flexible technology, and dedicated service and support provide the context necessary for the investment community to turn facts into valuable insights—and make the most of them.
The new creative picks up where the previous left off. This time it focuses on a particularly boorish office worker, drolly played by character actor Wyndham Maxwell, who ticks off an encyclopedic list of facts and non sequiturs during business meetings and in an elevator to the bemusement of his colleagues.
The tongue-in-cheek campaign, which plays more like a perfect-pitch comedy series than a typical B2B commercial effort, is unlike anything else in the financial services industry—both in its use of humor and in its humanistic approach. Starting this week, FactSet will roll out 16 unique spots—a combination of :30s, :15s, :06s and nine “shorts”—across multiple channels including digital, streaming and CTV.
“We are thrilled with the success of our bold ‘Not Just the Facts’ campaign, which emphasizes what sets the FactSet brand apart: not just the breadth and depth of our data offering, but the intelligent solutions and advanced technology that contextualize it for global finance professionals,” said Jenifer Brooks, Chief Marketing Officer at FactSet. “We’re proud of how the campaign’s direct and relatable tone, which challenges industry norms, has resonated with audiences. As we look toward this next phase of the campaign, we will continue to bring fresh perspectives and empathetic storytelling to demonstrate the value of our offerings.”
The first round of the “Not Just the Facts” campaign earlier this year achieved outstanding results, resonating deeply and driving significant engagement. The spots achieved 193 million impressions with a 98% increase in click-through rates and a 36% rise in video view-through rates across the campaign platform.
“Humor is an incredible way to connect with audiences—and the results we saw in round one of the campaign confirm it,” said Kim Mickenberg, Associate Partner and Executive Creative Director at VSA. “In ‘Not Just the Facts,’ we’ve built a platform that lets us entertain and engage our audiences while telling a really clear, compelling story about what makes FactSet so different. We’re so proud of the work and all the collaboration that went into it.”
Los Angeles–based Docter Twins Matthew and Jason Docter directed the original campaign and this new work through their production company, Thinking Machine. The identical twin brothers grew up in the Midwest and were heavily influenced by classic comedy directors like the Coen brothers and John Hughes. Their work is known for a subtle sensibility that balances smart performance and cinematic style with a witty flair for storytelling.
“It’s tough to choose a favorite line when working with the amazing team at VSA,” said the Docter Twins. “Two of our favorites from this go-round are “‘Trees can recognize their siblings’ and ‘Some dinosaurs had really tiny arms…and could probably only bench press like 400 lbs.’
“VSA’s Kim [Mickenberg], Megan [Schulist, creative director], and Bryan [Haney, motion producer] are never short on ideas.
“And with a client like [global head of brand] Christina Sradj and others at FactSet willing to let us riff, the actors find a playful space and never let up. They were best friends by the end of the shoot, which sums up the fun we all had working together.”
FactSet (NYSE: FDS) helps the financial community to see more, think bigger, and work better. Our digital platform and enterprise solutions deliver financial data, analytics, and open technology to nearly 8,000 global clients, including over 206,000 individual users. Clients across the buy side and sell side as well as wealth managers, private equity firms, and corporations achieve more every day with our comprehensive and connected content, flexible next-generation workflow solutions, and client-centric specialized support. As a member of the S&P 500, we are committed to sustainable growth and have been recognized as one of the Best Places to Work in 2023 by Glassdoor as a Glassdoor Employees’ Choice Award winner. Learn more and follow us on X and LinkedIn.
VSA’s purpose is to design for a better human experience. As a strategy and creative agency, we blend consumer insights and data with human-centered design to activate meaningful, motivating and measurable experiences in an increasingly noisy world. With offices in Chicago and New York, VSA offers a full range of integrated capabilities—branding, advertising, data science and technology—all under one roof. VSA is also a proud member of Meet The People, an international family of unified and independent agencies. For more than 40 years, we have delivered solutions for business and creative leaders at some of the world’s most respected brands and forward-thinking organizations, including Google, Nike and IBM.
Thinking Machine is a Los Angeles–based commercial production company specializing in creative storytelling.
When your business is at an inflection point, one of the most powerful levers you can pull is the one marked “brand.” Why? Because evolving the brand strategy at pivotal moments can help quickly signal a shift in the company to key stakeholders—driving belief and assuring audiences through inevitable change. There are a few key phases in a business cycle when deploying a brand especially pays off.
In the following scenarios, here’s how to best use branding to your advantage.
When you’re entering a marketplace, your biggest challenge is a lack of awareness. And your second-biggest challenge is your target audience’s apathy. In this scenario, brand drives differentiation.
The first step to pulling this lever is to develop brand positioning that distinguishes you from your competitors. What is everyone else saying, and how can you show up in a way that is meaningful, ownable and authentic?
The next step is to develop brand messaging that builds consistency around this differentiated positioning. Everywhere your potential customers experience your brand, they should have a compelling and cohesive experience.
The final step is developing a strong visual identity for brand recall. The visual identity should be informed by your positioning and industry and feel differentiated in the category without becoming trendy.
I’ve worked with a lot of companies preparing for their IPO, and the No. 1 priority here is investor education. Investors might be wary of taking on too much risk or remain unclear on the growth potential. So, here, brand really works to establish credibility.
The first and most valuable thing you can do is merge business strategy with brand strategy. Brand shouldn’t just live in the marketing department—it should be an embodiment of your business strategy and activated across the different business units.
Businesses will often then undergo “professionalizing” to prepare for rapid growth. That means giving the brand a cohesive identity and expression guides and, often, leveling up the appearance of the brand for a broader, more discerning audience.
Then you really just want to get that new brand out there as much as possible. Investor relationships branding that communicates the growth and potential is a great start, as is brand storytelling that highlights the business journey and its future. And, of course, you'll want to include media and PR strategy, as well as content that generates positive sentiment and casts your brand in a responsible, authentic light.
Brand shouldn’t just live in the marketing department—it should be an embodiment of your business strategy and activated across the different business units.”
Another phase when brand is a benefit is during mergers and acquisitions. These big business changes often beget confusion and uncertainty, both externally and internally.
The biggest landmine here is emotion. Both companies are likely to feel strongly about their brands and about what should change or stay the same. It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. I usually advise that companies undergoing this change engage in some research to uncover how their audiences perceive them. Determining brand equity via data can help alleviate emotion-driven decisions, and so can crafting a brand that works hard to put the best attributes forward, whatever those might be.
Usually, the data will suggest one of three things: sunsetting all but one existing brand, turning some brands into sub-brands or creating a new, unified brand. Whatever the data indicates, the most important thing to keep in mind is that any rebrand or reorganization must be paired with internal and external communications that educate clients or customers on how this M&A activity will benefit them. This can be done through PR, internal branding and employee engagement and content marketing—all of which should work in tandem to communicate the strengths and benefits of the merger.
Compared to startups, leaders at legacy businesses with incredible heritages face the unique challenge of keeping their brand feeling fresh and modern without losing the earned gravitas of its experience. Without consistent brand maintenance, companies can slowly start to slip into obsolescence, as customers perceive them as stodgy and outdated.
I often encourage our clients to engage in brand evolutions, not revolutions. Your customers are with you for a reason. It’s not about changing completely; it’s about changing the right things so that you’re relevant to your audience’s needs today.
Brand’s power here is in fostering relevance. You can start with an equity study to gain an understanding of what works and what needs to change. After you have the insights to move forward, you can engage in a brand refresh across your identity and expression. This can then be pulled down into your owned channels, particularly via a digital update to websites and mobile app experiences.
For some clients, I also recommend influencer and brand partnerships to develop cultural relevance and to get in front of a younger audience that might not know you as well as their predecessors.
It’s not about changing completely; it’s about changing the right things so that you’re relevant to your audience’s needs today.”
Marketers today are under ever-increasing pressure to deliver results on the investments they make. Branding can be a powerful tool to drive your business objectives, but before taking action, think critically about the challenges you’re trying to solve. Investing in professionalizing your brand won’t work if you’re fighting irrelevance, and rebranding immediately after an M&A won’t help if you don’t know what brand attributes are necessary to carry forward. Making decisions without doing this work is like a surgeon trying to operate without a diagnosis or an auto mechanic removing an engine without knowing what that warning light means.
Identifying which lever to pull will give you a crystal-clear idea of what you’re up against and start to shed light on the right ways to overcome it. Then you can go about identifying brand strategies to aid in your fight. This focused approach can help you turn your next inflection point into your next career highlight.
Read this article on Forbes, where it was originally published.
Addison Group, a prominent professional services firm specializing in staffing, consulting and executive search, recently rolled out a new website and refreshed brand. The change comes as Addison Group celebrates 25 years of empowering people through its tailored talent solutions, and embodies its commitment to the people it serves.
To conduct the brand refresh and website redesign, Addison Group tapped VSA Partners, a creative and branding agency. From messaging and strategy to graphic design and website implementation, the agency partnered with Addison Group across the rebrand and activation process.
“Very early in our work together, we uncovered Addison’s unique commitment to building long-term relationships with candidates and clients. That became the central truth that guided all of our work together, including its new mantra: ‘No one gets talent like Addison Group,’” said VSA Associate Partner and Executive Creative Director Bill Maday. “From specialized staffing solutions to consulting, this idea encapsulates the breadth of Addison Group’s offerings and their dedication to the real people they serve.”
With this mantra in place, VSA reimagined the Addison Group brand by centering it on what makes Addison Group so special: its people.
“Addison Group does a lot. But what all of our different offerings come down to is pretty simple, and that’s understanding people,” said VP of Marketing, Talent Solutions, Michael Barry. “VSA has been a great partner in keeping our brand messaging and visuals focused clearly on what sets us apart as a business, and unifying all our offerings underneath a clear and compelling vision.”
The new brand system is anchored by the hero graphics affectionately known as “gems,” which are a playful nod to the caliber of talent Addison Group recruits and supports. The gem shapes are flexible containers that can be used as framing devices as well as connective elements, particularly between Addison Group’s new people-centric photography styling. Other aspects of the larger brand system include a fresh and elevated color palette, custom iconography, and a friendly display typography.
VSA then took these foundational elements and translated them into a website redesign, teaming up with Dapper Digital to execute front- and back-end development. Along with a visual refresh, the team workshopped Addison Group’s user journeys. The workshop findings resulted in a focused navigation structure and an overall better user experience for two key audiences—job seekers and hirers—as well as improved usability for Addison Group’s internal teams.
“At the heart of this project was a focus on clarity and user experience,” said Associate Partner and Executive Creative Director YanYan Zhang. “Part of that was pulling the brand strategy—Addison Group’s story and purpose—through all the content on the site in a really clear way. And the other part of that search for clarity was getting precise on the user journeys, and how we could easily guide people toward the information and pages that are most relevant to them.”
As the talent acquisition landscape becomes increasingly competitive, Addison Group’s enhanced digital presence ensures it remains a go-to partner for businesses seeking specialized talent solutions. The website refresh is a key component of Addison Group’s broader strategy to leverage digital tools to better serve its clients and candidates.
VSA Partner and Head of Client Delivery Susan Pfeifer recently wrote a piece for Adweek about what agencies and clients stand to gain by rethinking the current ways of working. She lays out how a fractional approach could create a much-needed bridge between project-based engagements and retainer models.
By now, you’ve probably heard about the fractional CMO—a marketing leader contracted to work a limited number of hours a week instead of as a full-time executive.
The fractional CMO is a solution to a problem, and it can be a good one. Companies get CMO-level expertise at a reduced rate, and CMOs get better work-life balance. It begs the question: Could clients and agencies do the same thing? What if there was a “fractional agency” model?
A fractional agency approach would provide a small, dedicated team of experts who can scale their support based on the client’s evolving needs. It’s not a retainer or a traditional project-based model; there’s an assumption that you’ll always be working on something for the client, just not at the same scale month to month. You end up with a flexible work solution that benefits both parties.
A fractional agency approach is admittedly less of a distinct third offering than a more traditional approach, but I think of it more as the best of both worlds. A successful fractional agency that sells will contribute a lot more to stability than a retainer-based approach with no buyers.
If we could, of course we would all go back to the retainers of yesteryear. They offered the most stability for the agency, which in turn gave clients the kind of creative, strategic partnerships only time can build. And for some clients, a retainer model is still going to get them the best value for their spend.
But many clients can’t work like that. Just look at the numbers: Marketing budgets are a shadow of their former selves, having decreased almost 19% since 2022. And even if a client can afford a retainer model, sometimes their stakeholders refuse on principle to engage in retainer relationships because they’ve been burned in the past by disreputable partners. Those clients often opt for project-based models, which could lead to onboarding many agencies in the same length of time as the traditional retainer.
A fractional agency approach would provide a small, dedicated team of experts who can scale their support based on the client’s evolving needs.”
Project-based models allow clients to engage with agencies on only their most pressing needs, but their drawback is that they lack the strategic depth that an agency can bring over time. Even retainer models have their downsides—if there isn’t consistent work, the ability to appropriately plan, and opportunity for an agency to provide value, the entire relationship could be at risk. And both retainer and project-based models can become mired in scope creep, which requires tedious contract adjustments on both sides.
A fractional agency approach addresses all these downsides: By combining the flexibility of the project-based model along with the stability and long-term relationships of the retainer model, clients get agencies that will provide adaptable, ongoing support and a consistent focus on the client’s overall business health and strategy.
There are a few situations where a fractional agency approach works best.
Some industries and companies are almost guaranteed to work in boom-and-bust cycles. If you’re a startup or your sector often faces fast-changing conditions, having a flexible partner who can provide expert guidance, strategic insights, and quick pivots is invaluable.
Especially in B2B, some industries have highly complex regulatory conditions or customer journeys. These kinds of clients might want a project-based partner, but the onboarding process and lack of consistent strategic communication between agency and client can wipe out any savings they might have had by not engaging on a retainer basis.
Complicated industries, like health care or finance, need long-term strategic partners that understand their business and the players within. A fractional agency gives them that support without locking them in.
People often look to agencies for big ideas. But sometimes, hiring a fractional agency to do your team’s day-to-day can free up your marketers to engage in more of that big-picture thinking.
For example, websites require constant maintenance and UX/UI improvements, especially in competitive industries like consumer electronics and finance. A fractional agency can continuously update and optimize your site, ensuring it remains a powerful tool for attracting and retaining customers. Its people handle everything from content updates to technical tweaks, and they know your platform and workflow inside and out, saving you time and money in the long run.
Content creation is another area where fractional agencies work really well. You can engage experts who know your brand to create engaging, relevant content without stretching your internal resources too thin. If you need to scale up content before an event or push out a lot of content to take advantage of a market opportunity, you have the built-in support to do so without burning out your in-house teams or hiring additional full-time employees.
By combining the flexibility of the project-based model along with the stability and long-term relationships of the retainer model, clients get agencies that will provide adaptable, ongoing support and a consistent focus on the client’s overall business health and strategy.”
Clients today need to show ROI, often with smaller budgets and faster market changes. Agencies, on the other hand, struggle to achieve stability and profitability from traditional project-based work and scope creep.
Adopting a fractional model gives clients and agencies a solution that works better for everyone: Continuous involvement allows for better alignment with your overall business strategy instead of isolated campaigns; you can adjust the level of support as your needs change, avoiding the pitfalls of being locked into long-term commitments; the pay-as-you-go model ensures you’re only investing in the support you need when you need it, maximizing the return on your marketing spend.
At the end of the day, good partnerships are still those that are mutually beneficial and built on reciprocated respect. A fractional agency approach honors the qualities that make long-term agency–client relationships successful—consistency and understanding—and reimagines it for the current business environment.
