In the span of three years, three large financial services companies merged into one goliath called FIS. With roughly $12 billion in annual revenue and more than 60,000 employees serving more than 20,000 clients in 130 countries, FIS might be the largest company you haven’t heard of. It’s a situation Ellen Raftery, its chief marketing and communications officer, expects to remedy with a new multidimensional brand campaign.

Starting with a revamping of corporate values, Raftery and her team looked to streamline a portfolio of more than 850 products that consumed more than 9 million web pages. Ultimately, they redesigned the portfolio into 10 categories and one clear promise: "Advancing the way the world pays, banks and invests." New “three letter” ads that spell out FIS make the company’s offering accessible to various audiences. While Raftery admits there’s lot more to do, the campaign has already exceeded expectations in terms of reach and impact.

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Why did FIS decide to rebrand?

We acquired the Worldpay Business two years ago, not long after Vantiv and Worldpay had merged. When we acquired that combined organization, we reevaluated our brand, looking at all pieces of our strategic position, our brand positioning, our core values, what our differentiators were in this new combined organization.

We brought voices in from all around the world and from all sides of the company and had about 50 days to go from FIS today to FIS with a combined Worldpay. From there, we worked very, very closely with our people office to create a framework for developing our new core values.

What are those values?

Lead with Integrity, Be the Change and Win as One Team. Getting through the COVID situation would have been so much more difficult if we had not just rolled out our new company values literally six weeks before the world shut down. It was a great opportunity for us to really lean into those values and help shape the messaging as we were going through that.

There were so many things that were happening around the company that were really heroic. We had a whole rolling thunder communication program around it. It was a great way for us to lean into our company stories, our employee stories, our hero stories—those kinds of things that were happening as we were going through the pandemic. It brought really a sense of unity.

Why did you need to have a simple story?

When we brought the two companies together, we found ourselves with a massive portfolio of more than 850 products and saw ourselves extending into many different verticals. We not only had to bring the brand forward into these verticals, we had to actually introduce the brand to the verticals. It was a whole new challenge for us in terms of how you tell the story of the company but tell it in a way that was compelling to the new buyer audience.

How did you simplify a docket of 850 products?

We began working on a new architecture for our website, which we're in the process of redeveloping right now. That new architecture was a way for us to take our 800 different solutions that have 9 million pages on a giant website and get it down to a simple story so that when someone comes into the site they’ll know what we do.

We got that down to about 10 different categories with nice tiering underneath and a very simple story on top in terms of being a destination for innovators. The value really is, especially on a smaller budget, to bring it together underneath this brand and really drive that air cover interest. Then you can bring that client into the business based on its needs.

How are you communicating the story to the market?

We have a giant team of people that are collaborating across the company on these workstreams to build out our internal communication strategy, our commercialization kit and the assets and storytelling that goes into that. In terms of sales enablement, we’re working very collaboratively with our line of businesses in our sales organization so that we're hitting the mark on what they need to be able to have the right conversations with clients.

How is it going?

We didn't have a huge investment of media spend on the test pilot, but we saw some terrific performance. In terms of total impressions, we paid for 45 million and we got over 80 million. Our video completion rate was 64%, which is about two times what you would imagine having in our peer space.

We were breaking through to a new audience, they were looking at the material and they were engaging with it. We also tried something new for us—a pop-up survey. It gave us some great real-time information on brand awareness, interest in buying, interest in learning more.

What’s the business value of this brand work?

For one, we're moving outside our comfort zone into new audiences. The other piece of it really is the peer pressure from other competitors that are out there that are driving that visibility. We have to be a player, and it's important for investors and our clients to see that we're investing in them, where we're heading strategically, the value that we're bringing, the capability that we have, the criticality.

The critical infrastructure provider that we are—when we go down, the economy goes down—that's pretty significant and it's an important story to be able to tell. The consumer piece of it becomes super important as well. We're quickly moving into more of a b-to-b-to-c business where it's important that the consumers have some affinity for the brand, so that's really driving our next pivot here.

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