What you need to know:

• Workday has taken the wrappers off version 3.0 of its multi awardwinning ‘Rockstars’ campaign platform (which chalked up a top 10 debut at the 2023 Super Bowl and won Cannes Lions Gold), with a big advertising splash at the Masters Golf Tournament in April.
• The latest story features three rockstars – Gwen Stefani, Billy Idol and Paul Stanley – navigating the corporate world and rise of AI agents in the workplace through a humorous take on how they manage their own reallife agents.
• The new campaign iteration follows on from hefty brand consideration and sales wins off the decidedly B2C marketing approach. Notable figures from last year’s 2.0 campaign work include a 50 per cent uptick in website traffic, and 17 per cent increase in sales to conversions.
• Version 3 isn’t just an abovethe-line advertisement, however. Workday’s global CMO, Emma Chalwin, has been extending the creative approach down the demand gen funnel and across channels, including a physical bus tour across 15 states in the US, social and digital plays via rockstar profiles, persona-based content in account-based marketing, and even a Billy Idol LinkedIn account.
• Chalwin also doubling down on Workday customers as a key part of the business’ differentiation story and has overhauled the brand’s visual to showcase more authentic human expression.
• Helping Chalwin prove her impact as a marketer is a CMO dashboard she’s built herself oriented around the key metric of annual contract value, not marketing qualified leads.
• This commercial approach to marketing – along with ambitions to further grow internationally and recognition of local market nuances has now led her to rethink how she spends her marketing budget as well as better empower regional teams.

Workday global CMO Emma Chalwin has won internal kudos and marketing industry acclaim as a B2B marketer who’s proactively applying B2C brand smarts and emotive campaigning to deliver business impact at the HR and finance software provider. Two years after launching the ‘Rockstars’ campaign, and with a host of brand, lead conversion and incremental revenue improvements on her CMO scoresheet, the third iteration of the advertising debuted at what Chalwin dubs the “Oscars of the c-suite” – The Masters Golf Tournament – on 7-13 April.

But campaigning doesn’t stop at the top of the funnel or with brand advertising. Workday’s marketing teams are pulling the campaign narrative and distinctive brand assets into more channels and demand generation programs. This includes taking the Rockstars campaign on tour across 15 states in the US – a move that generated $43 million in incremental revenue – introducing personalised account-based marketing videos featuring these superstars to improve consideration of its growing product suite with more target personas, and even creating the first-ever rockstar profile on LinkedIn for Billy Idol.

“While normally your brand advertising creates more eyes, this is actually giving us tangible business results,” Chalwin says.

Rockstar play

Workday’s initial Rockstars brand campaign launched in February 2023 with a top 10 ranking Super Bowl ad and cast including Ozzy Osbourne, Billy Idol, Joan Jett, Gary Clark Jr, and Paul Stanley showing their frustration with corporate professionals encroaching on their ‘rockstars’ turf. The results from the multi award-winning campaign (it won a Gold Cannes Lion for B2B Craft) were hefty: Brand consideration up 65 per cent, awareness up 14 per cent, and a 24 per cent increase in companies that believe Workday is a brand they can trust. Importantly, it also turned the trend on leads, with a 50 per cent upside, Chalwin told Mi3 last year.

Version 2 kicked off last year, again threaded with fun creative humourising humans and complete with rockstar cast. “The second iteration was more around them actually seeing the value of the corporate people and the rock stars were starting to get even more agitated, thinking, do we have to take this seriously?” Chalwin says. She touts a 50 per cent increase in traffic to the website and 17 per cent increase in sales to conversions as key measures of impact.

Fast forward to 2025 and the swift rise of agentic AI in the workplace and across vendor product suites including Workday’s own broadening HR, finance and legal contract management solutions portfolio has led to a new campaign iteration that’s peppered with agent puns and use cases.

As Chalwin points out, barely anyone was talking about AI agents 12 months ago. Being a trusted advisor who can help large and mid-sized enterprises to manage both a rising machine workforce alongside their existing human resources is Workday’s key priority.

Workday’s fresh array of built-in agents include Recruiter Agent, which builds on the recent acquisition of HiredScore; Succession Agent, for identifying future leaders and building personalised development plans; and Workday Optimise, a tool for identifying process bottlenecks and resolving them. The vendor has brought on Workday Assistant to offer AI-run, role-specific support to employees around HR questions and is completing the acquisition of AI document intelligence platform, Evisort to extend into the legal space.

“Agentic AI is the biggest techtonic shift in our lifetime,” Chalwin believes. “A lot of companies come to us asking: Where do you start managing this? Human is one thing, but managing machines you can’t visibly see? It’s not only understanding what roles these play, but also how do we get the best out of the technology in a responsible way and as we say, while elevating humans.”

On a positive note, a survey undertaken by Workday and released at Davos in January found 83 per cent of people believe AI was going to elevate the potential of humans. Yet with reports of job cuts globally coming thick and fast as organisations scale up AI, there’s real concern around finding this balance between machine and human. Alongside this, Chalwin points to a continuing thread of conversation with HR, IT and finance customers which Workday needs to position itself as a trusted partner on and help solve: “If you can’t manage your people and your money in this new world of work, you have no company.”

Pulling brand work through the demand gen funnel

So it’s easy to see why taking the fear out of using AI agents and bringing humour to the situation drives version 3.0 of the Rockstars campaign. In the latest tranche, Workday yet again recruits three real rock stars – Billy Idol, Gwen Stefani and Paul Stanley – dresses them up in business attire, and situates them in the corporate world as they challenge the notion of AI agents making businesspeople rock stars. The trio reflect on their own powers of persuasion with own agents and getting them to do what they need them to do. Take one of the lines from Stefani: “You think AI agents can handle your tasks? Watch me handle my agent!”

“The rock stars are in the corporate environment realising they have to fit in with the corporate world to really be seen as a rock stars. So the corporate folk are kind of taking over,” says Chalwin of the new campaign narrative arc. “So while we’re solving actually, complex business problems in the real world, we want to make it fun, so we attract the audience to our content, then we start bringing them in.

“I think as a marketer, you understand you get bored of your content way faster or more than people do in the world. We’ve learnt that and over the past two years, we’ve had three iterations of the Rockstar campaign. The great news is we’re still attracting new prospects. Not only we’ve got our repeat fans, and won 30 Awards in total and they’re still coming in, which is fabulous – that iteration is critical, and we’re telling people a story bringing them on a journey.”

Making all this campaigning pay from a marketing perspective remains front and centre, and leveraging the creative power built over the last two years through the demand funnel is a key part of Chalwin’s priority list. Campaign extension, across channels and through the funnel is beefing up.

“We’ve created LinkedIn profiles for Billy Idol, so he’s now creating his own fan base in B2B. I think it’s the first time a B2B company has got a rock star to actually have a LinkedIn profile, and there’s some fun banter back and forth,” says Chalwin. “We’re leveraging their [rockstars] profiles on Instagram to push out our content. We’re also putting content on our social channels including out-of-office signatures, with things like ‘rock on Billy’. It’s not a one-time mode or one moment in time. It’s filtering into our demand gen programs.”

For example, Workday creates personalised videos for key personas under its account-based marketing (ABM) program leveraging the rockstars and campaign content. Chalwin even uses Billy Idol to introduce herself as she takes the stage across B2B conferences in Australia and globally.

The Illuminate Rockstar business bus tour, meanwhile, has toured 15 states, generating an incremental $43 billion in pipeline. “We have executive meetings, run customer podcasts, do a lot of one-to-one interviews, we have a whole demo station now kitted out with a whole AI transformation story,” continues Chalwin. “We go to customer where they are, then have an airstream that comes so they have a party for the customers in the evening. We’re really trying to think now about how we bring that to an international scale.”

Workday is working its way down from its enterprise target base into concerted mid-market efforts. The vendor boasts 11,000 customers globally including 60 per cent of the Fortune 500.

“Historically, we’ve sold predominantly into large enterprises; now a big part of our business is mid-enterprise into the top of small business. We want to get it more to 50/50. It’s probably 60/40 now, large enterprise to mid-enterprise right now, but it’s creeping up… so mid-enterprises are a big focus and big bet as is international as we move forward,” says Chalwin.

Customers as storytellers

Alongside the music rockstars, Workday has doubled down on showcasing its own customers as brand ambassadors. “They tell our story in their words, which is the strongest advocacy, you can get: A customer saying here’s the value we’re realising from partnering with Workday,” continues Chalwin.  

This all came from work to better recognise “the humility, culture of the company and our key differentiators” of Workday’s brand positioning.  “I wanted to create a narrative our competition couldn’t put their logos to.” Working with two agencies only got Workday so far, so she pulled together a 10-strong cross-functional team from across the business and came up with the concept of ‘forever forward’.  

“How do we use our customers as forward thinkers? And how do we create something that’s infinite and not going to go out of date? With that we did a whole rebrand, moving from whimsical illustrations to beautiful photography where you saw expression in real customers’ faces,” she says. “It’s been such a huge transition for us. Leveraging our forward-thinking customers to share their stories has been wonderful.”

Notably, Workday’s the ‘forever forward’ initiative has seen social post impressions up 75 per cent and engagements up 200 per cent quarter-over-quarter.

Productivity and targeting wins using AI have been another big win. One example Chalwin shares is using Propensity to buy data, lead scoring, predictive account scoring to get the right message to the right people at the right time. “We’ve had an increase of 17 per cent in our lead to sale conversion rates by using this technology,” she adds.

CMO dashboarding and elevating annual contract value

Behind all the campaign glamour is serious work on proving marketing’s impact internally. Chalwin knows she has to align with the sales organisation and sees low CMO tenure as a symptom of marketers who don’t understand the business or importantly, have not get their heads around the commercials.

“I know the numbers as well as the chief revenue officer, I own the pipe councils. I have to understand the business from every segment, every country. I also have to be able to prove the impact of marketing. A lot of people can’t do that,” she tells Mi3.

The first thing Chalwin did when she came to Workday was position marketing qualified leads and stage one pipe is an indicator of engagement and success. “That is not the key performance indicator of marketing, because nine times out of 10, it creates the wrong behaviour,” she explains. “You’re asking people to create leads and it’s a volume game, but there’s no correlation between that lead and ACV [annual contract value].”

Today, marketing’s key success measure is AVC. “I know the numbers as well as the chief revenue officer, I own the pipe councils. I have to understand the business from every segment, every country. I also have to be able to prove the impact of marketing. A lot of people can’t do that,” she says.

To keep track of all the numbers laddering up to this, Chalwin created her own CMO dashboard and reviews three areas daily. “One is marketing efficiency, so I can say how we budget to spend, what’s our attrition rates, hiring and ‘PCOM’ scores, which is an ongoing measurement of success,” she explains. “Most companies have biannual employee surveys. There’s a weekly set of questions so in real time I can see the happiness and sentiment of my team.

“Then I look at business efficiency. Have we got the right coverage ratios? What’s our pipeline forecasted towards ACV? How much ACV have we closed? Then I look at marketing impact, which is what campaigns, tactics are performing. Before I joined, there was nothing apart from we know how many leads we’ve created. I’m running marketing as a business so we can show our impact.”

It’s led Chalwin to allocate her marketing budget in a very different way. “Before, if I got a 10 per cent marketing budget increase, every department would get an equal share of the 10 per cent. Now, I ask first: What’s the budget to ACV ratios? What’s the growth trajectory for those countries? And how do I look at the brand-to-demand-to-customer advocacy in a very different way?”

In addition, having spent a lot of her money at a global brand level, Chalwin is switching it up to empower the regions more as Workday pursues international growth.

“I had the experience of coming from a region so I understand the nuances and being so far from HQ. It’s really important for me as a CMO to appreciate one size doesn’t fit all. The markets are very different,” she says. “Think about APAC: We talk about if should we do a Rising APAC, but we feel maturity of all the countries in region are very different, and geolocations are so far from each other. We have to have that level of understanding and empathy that the towers we have in the region now best serve the market. So we need to empower them. Yes, we give them the strategic direction and air cover from corporate, and what the overall company message is. But we also can’t sell our entire product portfolio everywhere across the globe so we have to be really mindful and tell the value realisation to local customers so… you can really see we’re intentional about growth.”