Putting SSE's women in power front and centre.
How SSE's own senior leaders, on camera, lifted click-through 38%, cut cost per click 71% and delivered a 68.9% female audience.
The Challenge
Women are underrepresented in senior roles across almost every industry, and the energy sector more than most. SSE wanted to push hard against that: raise awareness of the breadth of opportunity at the company, celebrate the women already leading there, and drive qualified traffic to the Women in Power landing page.
The brief was ambitious in a category where recruitment media is usually cautious. It also had to work inside Meta's Special Ad Category for Employment, where audiences are built from behaviour and context rather than demographics, which, as it turned out, suited the ambition. A campaign about visibility was always going to be won on content, not on audience settings.
The most persuasive case for a career at SSE was already working there.
Our Approach
We built the targeting from behaviour and context rather than demographics; interest and consumption audiences modelled on YouGov data, then contextual delivery against the content people were already reading and watching. The creative did the qualifying: real senior women at SSE, named, on camera, talking about their own career paths.
Paid search ran always-on underneath to capture demonstrable intent, so anyone the content moved could be caught at the exact moment they went looking. LinkedIn carried a precision reach-and-visibility role rather than a click role.
Nothing was set and left. When LinkedIn's first ad-led approach returned a 0.55% click-through rate, we rebuilt the content plan mid-flight around editorial posts featuring SSE staff, and CTR moved to 1.7%. When burst one's static creative plateaued, burst two was rebuilt around video. Each burst was briefed off the last burst's data.
The scale of
Execution.
Establish the brand platform
Static creative, a three-frequency delivery model and YouGov-modelled interest audiences doing the work demographics couldn't. Facebook click-through came in at 6–7% against a 1.5% forecast - four times plan - with 89% of positive results landing with women.
Put real leaders on camera
Filmed testimonials from SSE's own senior women replaced static assets, with programmatic insertion reinforcing retargeting against the video. Contextual targeting against the content itself delivered a 68.9% female audience split. Clicks rose 370% and cost per click fell to £0.04.
Owning the moment
A ten-day burst built around individual engineers across Meta, LinkedIn and search. Search click-through hit 38.54% at £0.18 a click. On LinkedIn, 70.07% of all clicks came from people with engineering roles or qualifications on their profile: the precise audience the platform was there to find.
The Results
Together the three bursts turned Women in Power from a campaign into a platform: a repeatable, measurable way to reach women who weren't looking for an energy career yet, and a body of evidence that SSE's own people are its most persuasive creative asset.