It’s a tired old cliché that blondes have more fun, but a new print and social campaign suggests the fair-haired may also make more money, too.
The suggestion that female blondes make 7% more than their darker-haired colleagues is one of “Five Surprising Traits of High-Earning People,” a new engagement strategy published by Workopolis.
The Workopolis numbers also suggest that spending more time in the bedroom is another indicator of higher pay. In fact, its numbers show that people who have sex more than four times a week earn 5% more than their less sexually active colleagues.
The statistics were gleaned from “a variety of studies that had been covered by the Workopolis editorial team over the years,” said Workopolis editor-in-chief Peter Harris.
“The idea with this ad campaign was to highlight some of the more surprising or conversation-starting insights that we’ve found, and highlight them to new audiences,” he told Marketing.
He added that salaries and why some people end up making more money than others are both “perennial topics” that almost always spark lively debates.
No kidding.
Other quirky statistics from the campaign—which is going out on Twitter , LinkedIn and Facebook— include a suggestion that coffee drinkers earn $3,624 more annually, and that each inch of extra height is worth $789 more per year. Print ads are running in the Toronto Star, Postmedia and La Press. Zulu Aplha Kilo designed the graphics for the campaign, while Media Experts handled the buy.
While sexual desire, height and caffeine might be great topics for discussion, the campaign also sheds light on some more controversial aspects of getting paid.
For example, men with children usually enjoy a pay bump, while women do not.
However, Harris said Workopolis isn’t trying to intentionally court controversy, but instead raise important issues about money, pay and credentials.
“We could just put out safe, one-way, branded messages, but that’s really old-school advertising. We’re trying to embrace the real-time interactivity that social media offers–and carry the best of that concept over to our more traditional forms of advertising as well,” he said.
But as many brands have learned, rolling out touchy subjects on Twitter and Facebook can often backfire, with angry tweets and negative shares across both platforms dominating the discussion.
“That’s always a concern, of course. But it is also what social media is for. We had to commit to being out there, socially, interacting with our friends and followers, engaging in genuine conversations,” said Harris.
The data that went into the campaign wasn’t just taken from Canadian numbers, and Harris said information collection went back several years and builds on a Workopolis article called “Five unfair reasons people make more money.”
“Our readers kept finding and sending us new surveys or studies that showed other non-performance-related factors that led people to earning bigger paycheques,” he said.
“So we updated it to ‘Eleven unfair ways.’ The (new) infographic ad compiles some of the more interesting of these.”
On the strategy side, Harris said the idea was to expand on the approach of the recent Workopolis “Pop Culture” campaign, which featured print and online ads showing clips of Don Cherry complaining about female sports reporters and Rob Ford bumbling his way through Toronto’s city hall.
“The notion was to combine editorial with our ad buy, to tap into the hot button topics of the day with the Workopolis point of view,” he said.
“Our new advertorials are similar, except in this case we’re not waiting for something to happen that we can react to. We’re sharing our own insights and observations in the hope of generating the discussions.”
