SSE
Women in Power
Three bursts, a Meta category that bans demographic targeting, and a 68.9% female audience reached without once targeting gender.
68.9%
Female audience, reached under rules that forbid targeting by gender
+370%
Increase in clicks once real leaders went on camera
£0.04
Cost per click, down 71% across the campaign
The Challenge
Meta's Special Ad Category for Employment exists to stop discrimination in job advertising. It also stops you reaching the women you are trying to reach.
SSE wanted three things at once: awareness of the career opportunities it offers, visible celebration of the senior women already leading inside the business, and qualified traffic to the Women in Power landing page.
The obvious route, targeting women directly, was closed. Every demographic lever the platform normally offers is switched off inside the Special Ad Category, by design and for good reason.
Which left a harder question than a media plan usually asks. If you cannot target who someone is, can you still find them?
If you cannot target women,
target what women are doing.
We built the audience out of behaviour and context rather than demographics: interest and consumption audiences modelled on YouGov data, delivered into contexts where the audience we wanted was already spending time. The platform never knew who it was reaching. The plan did.
Then the creative had to carry the rest. An employer brand film narrated by a brand voice is an advert. The same story told on camera by the woman who actually runs the department is evidence. SSE's own senior women became the campaign, which is also the only version of it that survives scrutiny from the audience it is aimed at.
What We Did
Three bursts, each one a test the next one learned from, plus a mid-flight correction on LinkedIn that doubled its click rate.
Burst one established the brand platform. Facebook returned a click-through rate of 6 to 7% against a 1.5% forecast, four times plan, and 89% of the positive response came from women.
Burst two put real leaders on camera. Filmed testimonials from SSE's senior women, delivered through contextual targeting, produced a 68.9% female audience. Clicks rose 370% and cost per click fell to four pence.
Burst three went narrower still, built around individual engineers and run across Meta, LinkedIn and search in ten days.
LinkedIn was corrected in flight. An ad-led approach was returning a 0.55% click-through rate. Switching to editorial posts featuring SSE staff took it to 1.7%, which is the difference between an employer talking and an employee talking.
Always-on paid search sat underneath all three, capturing anybody whose interest had already turned into intent.
The Results
Each burst beat the one before it, and the third proved the targeting was landing on the right people rather than just the cheapest ones.
Burst one. A 6 to 7% Facebook click-through rate against a 1.5% forecast, four times plan, with 89% of positive response coming from women.
Burst two. Clicks up 370%, cost per click down to £0.04, and a 68.9% female audience delivered without a single demographic targeting input.
Burst three. A 38.54% search click-through rate at £0.18 per click, across just ten days.
Qualification. On LinkedIn, 70.07% of clicks came from people with engineering roles or qualifications on their profile. The campaign was not just reaching women. It was reaching women who could do the job.
Headline movement. Click-through rate up 38% and cost per click down 71% across the campaign.