If we ask the right questions, we can shape better futures.

Every day, financial institutions make decisions that impact the lives of ordinary South Africans. But the truth is that most see numbers, not people. We wanted to bring the human need of care to every facet of investment influence. Introducing Upshot – a collaboration between investment nerds and world-renowned authors to turn financial concepts into not-so-far-fetched stories about our future.

Case study video

The book is a key part of the campaign and will be delivered to the campaign’s most important audiences.

It features seven stories, delivered by six authors, all curated by international best selling author Lauren Beukes. Both Lauren Beukes and Tade Thompson are Arthur C. Clarke Award winners (one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards). Some of the other writers include young new voices out of Johannesburg, to best-sellers based in Cambridge.

Each story is also preceded by the investment concepts which inspired them. Several hundred of the books were made available, and were sent to key potential clients, as well as the media and influencers who helped us build the lore around it.

We turned three of the books - Pre-loved, Undercurrency and Last Shot into audio books which were released across Podcast platforms like Spotify, etc. as well as being accessible from the campaign site.

The audio books

You can listen to them here. Pre-loved is my personal fav. Get some good headphones and grab a cuppa. They’re each around 30-40mins long, but I’d like to think it’s some time well spent with some brilliant fiction. We also put a huge amount of craft into the audio production.

The audio campaign

To drive awareness of the audiobooks specifically on Spotify, we ran an audio campaign which consisted of six ads. Here are my two favs. To produce them, we used various AI software which influenced the scripting, provided the voice for each ad and composed and mixed the audio. So, doing our best to create in ways which lived up to the campaign’s promise of a new future none of us are used to yet.

The campaign website formed a fundamental part of the campaign. And gave access to all the stories for anyone who was interested. (We reached over 7 million people, making the anthology a best seller at a global level.) It’s a sizeable site, so it’s best to head straight there if you’d like to see more of it as well as soak up some of the stories or the financial concepts which inspired them.

https://upshot.riscura.com/

Besides some cracking fiction being written by some amazing authors, a final creative highlight was creating a specific book cover for each of the stories. These covers appear as divider sections in the book, on the website and as various other campaign elements from banner ads to Spotify thumbnails. I’ve included just the illustrations below.

Whilst the book was read enough times to get
onto the Wall Street Journal Bestseller list,
we reached an additional 7.6 million people.
The campaign was discussed by
various major news channels.

Awards

Loerie Awards (Creative)
Print crafts: writing - Gold
Branded content - radio and audio - Bronze
Out of home crafts - Craft certificate
Direct mail - Finalist
Radio and audio crafts - Writing - 3x finalists

Creative Circle (Creative)
Out of home - direct - 1st place
Out of home - 1st place
Radio and audio - 3rd place

Bookmark Awards (digital)
Breakthrough on a budget - finalist (pending)
Best use of programmatic media - finalist (pending)

New Generation Awards (Digital)
Integrated - Finalist

Vector (UK literary awards)
Top 10 of 2021 - Science Fiction from Africa

Team

Year: 2021