Waze Ads, which provides a suite of ads products that serve within the world’s largest crowdsourced navigation app,needed to revamp its storytelling efforts. Primarily, the team wanted to focus on building out its case study library to more effectively show advertisers how Waze Ads can effectively build awareness, extend reach, and increase visits to brick-and-mortar locations.

Prose helped Waze create a framework for consistent and polished content marketing and scale their content operation. The collaboration resulted in a centralized resource for all case studies in a variety of languages, along with stronger thought leadership through other content assets and channels.

Waze wanted to use case studies as a tool to drive awareness and consideration, both through industry-wide thought leadership and for one-to-one sales presentations and collateral. Their goal was to showcase the innovative ways that their clients advertised on Waze, to help show the platform’s immense value and unique abilities among digital marketing platforms.

Before working with Prose, Waze had a number of outdated case studies that needed to be overhauled, and no current, centralized way for clients to find these stories or other pieces of content. Waze's narratives and arcs had been managed internally, the quantity and variety of stories the team had to tell exceeded the bandwidth they had available, leading the team to seek out external resourcing.

They knew they needed an agency to help them create a large volume of content that had consistent messaging and a high quality standard. Yet while considering an external resource, it was important for the team to preserve Waze’s fun, breezy tone of voice while explaining complex marketing strategies that can often get buried under confusing jargon.

To start, Waze and Prose ran a trial phase together. Waze shared its brand and tone of voice guidelines and provided a campaign overview, and Prose was able to quickly learn and incorporate these preferences over the course of a few initial projects, keeping the dialogue open along the way.

“At the beginning of working with any outside resource, there’s always a little bit of back and forth and iteration required,” says Stephanie Fleishman, Waze Ads’ global B2B marketing manager. “But Prose caught on quickly, and once we got settled into a pattern of collaboration, it was smooth sailing. We also have the benefit of having a project manager who oversees the content team at Prose, which helps ensure guidelines are met while onboarding new editorial resources required to scale our content creation efforts as needed.”

Waze had collaborated with individual freelancers for content support in the past, and has found working with Prose’s expanded capacity and consistent, vetted talent to be a welcome change. 

“Having the power of a fully staffed agency, in which there is a solid stable of trained folks who can step in and cover our needs anytime has been wonderful,” explains Stephanie. “It’s also great that we can work with multiple people on the same project who have different areas of expertise. This has been helpful not only when creating case studies, but also when creating long-form reports.”

Working with Prose helped Waze Ads marketing scale their storytelling faster, and, most importantly, create stories that really shine. For instance, Prose works with us to incorporate brand sound bites after holding interviews with clients, which adds additional texture that helps bring these stories to life.

“Before we added this step in the storytelling process, the case studies we crafted often fell flat,” says Stephanie. “We’ve really brought our content to the next level with Prose.” 

With its success in the US market, the Waze team also started working with Prose’s translation and localization team to create dozens of similar content in a variety of languages for its other markets, including LATAM, APAC, and Europe.

The collaboration has resulted in a case study and content machine, helping Waze’s resource library grow from 0 to over 100 globally consistent case studies, along with competitive reports and proprietary research. Waze now has a process in place with Prose to create content globally, helping the brand drive awareness and consideration at scale.

“Prose has enabled us to scale our storytelling with a level of consistency and polish that really cuts across all of the storytelling that we do now. Whether it be articles, reports, even social media announcements, Prose has elevated our storytelling with consistency on a global level.”