ADP

What they asked us to do ...

Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (ADP) may not be a company you’re familiar with, but there’s a good chance you get a paycheck with their name on it. ADP is the top provider of payroll services in the U.S., processing 24 million paychecks domestically and 32 million worldwide. Despite its enviable market share, ADP faces growing competition and challenges to its leadership.

According to analysts, the company’s current problems are rooted in its more successful past. Until 2002, ADP boasted 165 consecutive quarters of double-digit earnings growth, a Wall Street record. Cohn & Wolfe created a communications strategy to take this media-shy Fortune 300 company and embark on its most strategic communications initiative to date, leveraging the company’s greatest asset—its wealth of payroll data—to build awareness of ADP, its brand and its leadership.

The ADP National Employment Report (NER) officially launched May 3, 2006, providing an alternative measure of private employment in the United States. To develop and maintain the report, ADP partnered with Macroeconomic Advisers, LLC (MA), one of the nation’s leading economic consultancies founded by former Governor of the Fed, Larry Meyers. In less than eight months, C&W has generated enormous awareness of ADP’s brand and positioned the company as the leading provider of employment services and meaningful employment data on Wall Street.

What we did ...

We successfully established credibility among key influencers – chief economists at virtually all major financial institutions regularly revise employment forecasts on the heels of our monthly release. As evidence, an NER consensus has been established by key influencers and can be accessed through any Bloomberg Terminal. The NER has become an important data point each month that is included in nearly all market stories and virtually every financial institution’s internal and client reports.

Our results ...

Since the NER’s launch on May 3, 2006, media coverage has been the sole vehicle supporting this index, which has garnered coverage in more than 2,000 news stories, driven more than 100,000 unique visitors to the Report’s Web site and has been directly attributed to generating significant new sales leads for ADP. The Report is covered each month on CNBC’s Squawk Box and talked about on nearly every CNBC news show on release day. The NER receives consistent print media coverage in outlets such as Associated Press, Bloomberg, BusinessWeek, CNBC, Dow Jones, Financial Times, Forbes, Investor’s Business Daily, Marketwatch, New York Times, Reuters, U.S. News & World Report, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal. The Report receives regular coverage in many of Wall Street’s most influential blogs, including Wall Street Journal’s MarketBeat, Financial Watch, Econbrowser, First Draft and The Big Picture.