ADP: a case of unexpected humanity

Helping a payroll behemoth put the “Human” in Human Capital Management

Long Story Short…

The Sitch: ADP, the largest payroll company in the US, was preparing to launch a major new software product that would fundamentally shift their market positioning: from payroll provider to Human Capital Management expert.

Meaning that, in addition to getting people paid, ADP would now play in the world of benefits management, training & development, recruitment, onboarding, remote teamwork facilitation…the whole employee-centric shebang.

The Challenge: This shift was a particularly tall order because ADP’s core customer was the same: CHROs of enterprise organizations. They’d long trusted ADP to pay their people, but turned to warmer, fuzzier brands like Workday and Gusto to manage the human vs. capital side of their business.

If ADP was gonna succeed in the world of HCM, we needed to significantly shift HR professionals’ perceptions of the brand.

And to do that, we had to take ADP’s competitively un-catchable differentiator – they pay 1 in 5 Americans – and position it as the reason to believe that ADP is the right partner to help CHROs manage their humans.

The Insight: CHROs are charged with managing most fundamentally unpredictable resource there is: people.

And they’re doing it in a context of unprecedented disruption: hybrid work environments, quiet quitting, mental health as workplace prerogative, demographic and cultural shifts as Gen Z enters the workforce.

One word sums up the emotional environment in which CHROs make every decision: Uncertainty.

The Strategy: Reframe ADP’s unique differentiator in the emotional context of our audience.

Because ADP pays 1 in 5 Americans, they have Big Data-driven knowledge across industries, geographies, departments, teams, and roles of all the human insights that payroll encompasses: attendance, performance, promotions, attrition, and more. You name it, ADP knows it.

Which means they offer more than an HCM solution.

In a world of work where the only guarantee is constant change and fundamental unpredictability, ADP gives you the ultimate unfair advantage: Certainty.

The Story:

(Fun fact: “The 25th Hour,” the first spot in ADP’s new HCM campaign, launched - fittingly - on the day the clocks changed for Daylight Savings)