Show 3. juni 2026
October 10, 2021
The Department: How Maersk disrupted the B2B advertising space
WPP Media & NoA | &Co.
for
A.P. Møller – Mærsk
Kategori :
Type :
andet
Show 3. juni 2026
October 10, 2021
WPP Media & NoA | &Co.
for
A.P. Møller – Mærsk
Kategori :
Type :
andet
Maersk, one of Denmark’s most iconic companies, is in an era of strategic transformation from a heritage ocean carrier to a global end-to-end logistics integrator. A critical component of this transformation is building market awareness for Maersk’s Air Freight offering – an area where the brand historically had low visibility.
To succeed, we needed to shift market perception among key decision-makers in the logistics space, moving them from seeing Maersk as an ocean carrier to an integrated logistics provider and, crucially, build awareness for Maersk’s Air Freight offering.
The analysis revealed a fundamental challenge: the logistics industry communicates in a way that is almost indistinguishable. Advertisers rely on the same visuals and messages – containers, trucks and corporate interviews – creating a sea of identical B2B communication.
The result is simple: decision-makers scroll past.
Stagnating engagement across the sector showed that traditional B2B tactics were no longer effective. To build awareness for Air Freight, Maersk needed to break the category mold.
In conclusion, our strategy focused on
Disruption (Behavioral): Defy low-involvement norms by capturing active attention. We aimed to stop the scroll and hold engagement to tell a story that sticks
Perception (Brand): Drive a significant uplift in awareness of Maersk’s Air Offering and positively impact key attributes like “Frees up time to focus on core business”
The strategy was built on a simple insight: logistics decision-makers are people first, professionals second. In a ruthless attention economy, purely rational messaging does not earn attention. If we wanted to explain complex logistics solutions, we first had to earn the audience’s time.
Instead of behaving like a logistics advertiser, Maersk chose to behave like an entertainment brand.
The result was “The Department”, a character-driven comedy universe set inside a fictional logistics department. Through humour, relatable office scenarios and high production value, the series captures the everyday chaos logistics professionals will recognise, while naturally demonstrating how Maersk solves real operational challenges – including the speed and reliability of Air Freight.
Based on this insight, the content was distributed through a digital video ecosystem designed to reach decision-makers in both a professional and personal context, optimizing for attention and video views to maximize storytelling, recall potential, and crucially, time spent with the new universe.
Professional context: LinkedIn served as our primary B2B anchor, targeting logistics decision-makers while in a business mindset. Video formats disrupted the otherwise functional B2B feed and encouraged deeper engagement.
Personal context: Recognising that B2B buyers consume content beyond working hours, we extended the universe to YouTube, leveraging its strong video reach to engage audiences in more relaxed viewing environments.
Precision targeting: Programmatic video and display were used to ensure we reached relevant stakeholders and existing Maersk customers through advanced targeting capabilities.
In China, the strategy was adapted to local consumption habits through partnerships with iQiyi, MangoTV and WeChat/Tencent, mirroring the global balance of high-quality video and precise targeting.
The bold shift from traditional B2B communication to entertainment-driven storytelling delivered exceptional results.
On LinkedIn, the video creatives achieved an extraordinary average dwell time of 18.41 seconds, more than 500% above platform benchmarks and among the strongest performances across LinkedIn in all of 2025. The videos delivered a strong 67% view-through rate, more than double the B2B average, demonstrating a remarkable ability to capture attention among logistics decision-makers.
Overall brand favourability increased by 16.6%, directly addressing our goal of influencing the perception of Maersk positively.
The awareness of Maersk’s Air Freight offering rose by 18.5%, fulfilling our objective to build knowledge around this key offering. Key brand attributes saw a notable uplift as well, with an increase of 19.4% in “Frees up time to focus on core business”.
In addition, the campaign was also able to increase brand awareness by 9.8%.
By breaking category conventions and earning real attention, Maersk successfully repositioned itself in the minds of logistics buyers and proved that, even in B2B, entertainment can drive business transformation.
