Breaking a Stigma and Making It Exciting

ICAEW needed to challenge the stereotypes around accountancy and raise awareness of its qualifications among 18-34 year olds, with a particular focus on engaging female audiences. The profession carries a stigma as dull and exclusive, at odds with how young people, and young women in particular, picture an exciting career. Disrupt Marketing's read was that niche UK creators in finance, career advice and motivational content already held the trust of the exact people ICAEW needed: students exploring a first career and professionals weighing a change.

The idea was to present accountancy as a lucrative, accessible and inclusive career through creators those audiences already followed. Disrupt Marketing ran an organic campaign across Instagram and TikTok from March to early May 2024, timed to National Careers Week, using creators from 32k to 185k followers. Each worked to a personalised brief tailored to their audience, several returning from earlier ICAEW campaigns to carry built-in familiarity, and content was released on a staggered schedule to sustain engagement.

Anchoring career content to National Careers Week gave it a natural reason to appear in feeds, and the mix of creator sizes balanced reach with relevance. The agency reports 526k impressions, 5% above the 500k target, a 68.81% impression rate, a 4.57% engagement rate and 406 link clicks. All figures are self-reported, the 28K engagement figure is labelled as a rate but reads as a total count, and no business outcomes such as qualification enquiries or applications are disclosed.