2015 Bronze Best Writing

Proximity London and UM London

The Economist

Raising Eyebrows and Subscriptions

The Team

John Treacy - Executive Creative Director Sharon Whale - Deputy Chairman Jim Dyer - Group Account Director
Jos Canavan - Account Manager Rob Kavanagh - Creative Director Darren Burnett - Joint Head of Planning
Tris Sellen - Art Director Dianna Wu - Designer Mark Cripps - EVP Brand and Digital Marketing
Mark Beard - VP Digital Media and Content Strategy Holly Donahue - Global Senior Manager Brand Communications
Alan King - Managing Partner - Digital Neil Peace - Digital Strategy Director

Campaign overview

The Economist needed a new base of younger subscribers, but these ‘progressives’ currently viewed the publication as too narrowly focused on finance and politics and not especially relevant to them. Successfully challenging perceptions without destroying the intellectual legacy of its famous brand ads of the past, The Economist hooked new readers using intriguing ads that took the publication in a new direction. The campaign overachieved, beating its new lead target more than five times over, delivering an impressive ROI and providing The Economist with a vast reservoir of insight about its readers’ interests and behaviours.

Strategy

Subscription had plateaued as millennials looked elsewhere for their current affairs content. But from its inception The Economist had been the original campaigning voice for progressive liberalism, with a mission to fight ignorance and vested interest. Research showed readers to be “intellectually curious”, with “a thirst to understand the important issues around the world”, which was a perfect match with the publication if only the audience knew it. Under the premise ‘There is nothing more provocative than the truth’, the campaign set out to engage its audience wherever they were already getting their current affairs, draw them back to economist.com articles and take them on a dynamic content journey that would hook them into registering and subscribing.

Creativity

The team used the brand’s famous wit to write more than 60 provocative headlines to grab interest and these were used in digital display on other news sites, including quality sources such as The Wall Street Journal and CNN. Many headlines were written in near real-time, live from The Economist’s newsroom and editorial meetings, to jump on controversial news stories just as they broke – for example, covering allegations of torture against the CIA. The publication’s vast content resources were used to create content journeys to match the interests and tastes of seven distinct segments, identified through deep analysis. This high-quality content was used to give each new prospect a trial of the site and their own “Economist epiphany” as their preconceptions fell away.

Results

The campaign quickly smashed its 650,000-prospect target to deliver 3,617,000 new prospects and £12.7 million value from a £1.2 million media budget. In addition, The Economist has learned exactly what its different audiences want to read about and how they want their content served, giving itself a fantastic bedrock for future success that has already seen a second phase of the campaign increase the prospect pool to almost 8 million. Audience perception has been fundamentally re-aligned with The Economist’s mission, with the brand seen much more as ‘trustworthy’, ‘expert’, ‘progressive’, ‘relevant to you’ and ‘has content worth sharing’ as opposed to ‘academic’. In the UK, consideration leapt 32% and willingness to recommend increased 24%, whilst in the US awareness jumped 64%, consideration