2016 Gold Best use of programmatic

Agency UM London

Client The Economist

Campaign summary

This just in: millennial subscriptions up 165%

Campaign overview

Breaking news: millennials weren’t reading The Economist, and they needed a new messaging strategy to attract subscribers.

Objectives were to challenge outdated assertions about The Economist amongst millennials in EMEA, Latin America and North America, and to create 1,200 millennial subscribers across these regions.

Strategy

Social media is the place where millennials stay up-to-date with current affairs. Nine out of 10 use Facebook as their main news channel.

While millennials’ social feeds are bombarded with news content, they’re rarely delivered quality content tailored to their interests.

Follow the BBC or The Guardian for instance, and you’ll still end up wading through hundreds of irrelevant posts.

The Economist vowed to serve millennials all around the world breaking content into their social feeds - tailored to their interests and location.

On Facebook the content would include filtered posts from The Economist, with targeting extending to Twitter and Instagram. Identifying intellectual millennials on these platforms would be tough. To identify them, they analysed existing millennial subscribers and app users to understand who they were and what content they consumed.

Creativity

The campaign launched by serving 50,000 different creative variants to millennial targets in three key regions.

Content came from The Economist’s feed containing images for breaking news, thousands of infographics, special reports and regional subscription offers.

Each article was tagged by topic (like politics, tech and global causes) and served to targets based on their behaviours and location, along with a tailored subscription offer. All posts linked to the full article or a subscription page.

They tested the effectiveness of a programmatic decision tree, and adopted an automated content delivery system to test formats, images, article CTAs and subscription offers - in real time - and refined messaging.

The campaign adopted a news desk-style system to serve creative for new features and news articles within an hour of them going live, and hardly ever served the same article or ad to the same user twice.

Results

Just in: millennials spotted The Economist’s social messages and started reading. Now millennial subscriptions are up 165% year-on-year.

The campaign attracted 58 million millennials to these posts, and 4.9 million engaged with them - an engagement rate of 8.5% - far above the 3% average for the sector.

The work created 4,505 new millennial subscribers - 271% above the target of 1,200. This amounts to £1.5m in lifetime subscription value in just six months - an ROI of 147%.

As an added bonus, The Economist created a further 2,889 non-millennial subscribers in emerging markets worth an additional £1m in lifetime subscription value in the same six month period. Facebook is now The Economist’s cheapest source of subscribers outside of PPC - and the most profitable source of millennial subscribers. Such has been the success of the campaign, The Economist has already invested £1m+ extending reach into more territories.

Team

Neil Peace (Digital Strategy Director) • Joel Roberts (Paid Social Director) • Andy Keane (Campaigns Operations Director)

Contributors

Proximity (Creative)