Inside The Red Thread: A Global Case Study in Creative Collaboration
How UBS Asset Management, UNIT9 and TOML turned a complex global thought-leadership platform into a connected experience across 15 cities.
Turning UBS Asset Management’s The Red Thread into a live global platform was never going to be simple. Designed as a thought-leadership series spanning multiple markets, the ambition went far beyond staging conferences. The challenge was to create a connected experience that could speak to a sophisticated financial audience across regions: while remaining locally relevant, strategically sharp, and creatively coherent. The goal was to create a platform where conversations about sustainable investing, geopolitical change, and long-term economic shifts could take place in a meaningful way.
The campaign was shortlisted as a finalist at The Drum Awards for B2B Thought Leadership, acknowledging the strength of the strategy and execution behind the series. And also received a 2025 Financial Content Marketing Award from the Gramercy Institute for its European edition, recognizing excellence in financial content marketing. The award was judged by a panel of marketing leaders from major financial, media, and marketing organizations and presented at the Gramercy Institute Financial Marketer’s Forum & Awards in New York City. The real value lay in how the campaign came together: through trust, alignment, and close collaboration between UBS, UNIT9, and TOML.
Weaving the Red Thread: A Global Collaboration That Ties It All Together
The Red Thread was built on a simple but powerful idea: connection. That philosophy became the foundation of the campaign. Just as the red thread links people across distance, the event series was designed to connect investors across global financial centers. Each event addressed the realities of its local market, yet every conversation remained tied to the same broader questions shaping the future of investing.
So instead of running one global message everywhere, the campaign was built as a series of events across different financial centers. Each one focused on what actually matters in that location. Different conversations, different priorities, shaped by local market conditions, regulation, and economic climate. At its core, the campaign sought to bring together a global audience under one unifying concept, while still respecting the distinct cultural, economic, and strategic realities of local markets. The name itself reflected the central challenge, maintaining a coherent global narrative without losing regional relevance. Each activation, conversation, and experience was designed to feel part of a larger story, yet tailored enough to resonate authentically on the ground.
For UBS, a financial institution built on partnership and trust, was a strategic expression of its identity. The Red Thread moved the brand from messaging to meaning. It created space to engage with critical issues such as sustainability, innovation, and collaboration in a way that felt substantive rather than performative. By connecting global insight with local perspective, they were positioned not only as a financial powerhouse but as a long-term partner helping clients navigate complexity in a rapidly changing world.
The Challenge: Turning Obstacles Into Opportunities
Our Approach: Where Strategy meets Creativity
In practice, this resulted in a series of live events built around focused discussions, presentations, and exchanges. Each activation was supported by a considered content layer, extending the conversation beyond the room without overcomplicating the experience. The production remained deliberately restrained, prioritising clarity and relevance over scale. That balance between global coherence and regional relevance became the central challenge of the Red Thread campaign. The structure had to allow conversations to evolve naturally in each market while keeping them connected to the same underlying themes shaping the future of investing.
Understanding the Scope: Creating this event series meant addressing a unique set of challenges:
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Global Reach: The campaign had to connect with audiences in 14 key business hubs across three continents, each with distinct financial priorities.
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Localized Impact: Each city’s investment landscape demanded content that reflected local realities while staying aligned with UBS’s broader vision.
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Engagement at Scale: The events needed to balance thought leadership with personal relevance, ensuring attendees felt the content spoke directly to them
This couldn’t be a one-size-fits-all campaign. To meet the challenge, the teams focused on delivering tailored, meaningful experiences. Creating this event series came with some big but exciting challenges:
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Region-Specific Content: Presentations were built around the concerns and opportunities unique to each city, making sure every session felt relevant to its audience.
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Deeper Engagement: Thoughtful printed materials offered more than just takeaways—they encouraged attendees to explore UBS’s insights long after the events.
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Personalized Outreach: Social media campaigns and carefully designed email invitations connected with the right people, building excitement and anticipation.
UBS developed the Global Themes and Outlook series, focusing on long-term forces shaping financial markets, and these themes formed the backbone of the campaign, ensuring consistency across all events. The series was designed to create sustained engagement rather than short-term visibility. Instead of delivering fixed narratives, the events created space for ongoing discussions around themes that are still evolving, particularly sustainable investing, where regulatory frameworks, market expectations, and long-term performance considerations continue to shift. This positioned the conversations closer to decision-making than to communication.
Topics were addressed in terms of their practical implications: how sustainability influences portfolio construction, how risk is being reassessed, and where long-term value is emerging. The intent was not to simplify these issues, but to engage with their complexity in a way that reflects how they are experienced by investors. At the same time, each city received a tailored program reflecting its local investment landscape. Presentations, discussions, and speakers were adapted to regional priorities, while a unified event structure and visual system ensured every location still felt part of the same global campaign.
By staying focused on local needs while maintaining a global perspective, the event series didn’t just share knowledge; it created a meaningful connection between UBS and its audience, cementing its role as a partner in navigating the future of finance. The campaign began with a shared narrative that could travel across markets.
Results: What happens When Creativity Goes Global?
Spanning 15 cities across 12 countries, The Red Thread brought together live events and innovative digital content to deliver a memorable experience. Esteemed speakers, including Nobel Laureate Michael Spence, former NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, and global sports icon Roger Federer, offered their insights on pressing topics like sustainability, geopolitics, and financial innovation. The series not only showcased UBS’s thought leadership but also underscored its dedication to ESG principles.
The outcomes reflect the strength of the approach rather than the scale of the campaign. Attendance increased by 52%, with more than 3,000 financial professionals participating globally. This level of growth points to sustained relevance across markets, not just initial interest, but continued engagement as the series progressed. The campaign also achieved broad external visibility, with coverage in outlets such as ANSA, El Mundo, and Financial Lounge. This extended the reach of the conversations beyond the events themselves, reinforcing their position within the wider financial and cultural discourse. More significantly, post-event data indicated a 40% uplift in brand perception. This shift suggests that the experience delivered on its intent, strengthening trust and reinforcing UBS’s position as a long-term partner. Rather than relying on messaging alone, the campaign built credibility through direct engagement, where ideas were explored in depth and in context.
What this highlights is a broader principle in building effective global campaigns.
Consistency is not achieved through uniformity, but through alignment. When content, format, and experience are developed as an integrated system, each element reinforces the other, creating clarity and coherence across every touchpoint. Equally important is the role of controlled flexibility. Maintaining a defined core while allowing delivery to adapt to local context ensures that relevance is preserved without diluting the overall narrative. The key takeaway is structural. Campaigns that succeed at scale are those that clearly define what must remain constant, while deliberately designing for what can evolve. This balance enables stronger engagement, sharper positioning, and a more durable shift in perception over time.
The Red Thread & The Power of Teamwork
Creatively, the campaign blended iconic global venues with tailored digital interfaces, ensuring consistency in messaging while adapting to local audiences. By integrating physical and digital elements, The Red Thread reframed traditional B2B marketing into a more considered and engaging experience. It shifted the focus from presenting research to facilitating conversations around the forces shaping global finance. In doing so, it showed that thought leadership gains depth when it connects people, perspectives, and markets within a shared dialogue. This was supported by clear leadership, which ensured these perspectives strengthened the work rather than diluted it, by aligning decisions to a defined core idea and resolving tensions early.
The project was built through close, ongoing collaboration across disciplines.
Designers, animators, writers, strategists, and marketing teams worked alongside each other from the outset, shaping the campaign as it developed rather than handing it off between stages. That proximity made a difference. Ideas were tested earlier, decisions were made with more context, and the work stayed coherent as it moved from strategy into execution. When different perspectives are brought into the process at the right time, the outcome is sharper. And that's what gave the project its clarity.
This innovative campaign not only reinforced UBS Asset Management’s leadership in the financial industry but also highlighted its commitment to sustainable investing, forward-thinking strategies, and deeply engaging client experiences. By bridging insights from 14 key business hubs across three continents, the campaign successfully connected local investment priorities with a global perspective, ensuring relevance and impact at every level.
