2015 Gold Best Use of Programmatic
01 Dec 2015
Proximity London and UM London
The Economist
Raising Eyebrows and Subscriptions
The Team
Sharon Whale - Deputy Chairman, Jim Dyer - Group Account Director, Jos Canavan - Account Manager, John Treacy - Executive Creative Director, Rob Kavanagh - Creative Director, Fran Perillo - Copywriter, Tris Sellen - Art Director, Darren Burnett - Joint Head of Planning, 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
Subscriptions for The Economist had plateaued. Positioning the publication as the ticket to success for white-collar warriors was not appealing to millennials. There was also evidence that their core prospect base was rejecting it as a ‘handbook for the corporate elite’ – a misconception given The Economist’s progressive liberal mission to fight ignorance and vested interest.
The magazine’s ‘There is nothing more provocative than the truth’ campaign attracted millions of new prospects to engage with The Economist, spend time with its content and develop a new, extremely positive perception of the brand.
As well as outperforming its target by 500%, the campaign gave The Economist a refreshed brand perception within key audiences as well as an intricate understanding of its readers’ preferences based on millions of new interactions.
Strategy
The campaign sought to provoke new readers into trying relevant sample content for themselves, and experience their own ‘Economist epiphany’. Potential readers were nudged towards targeted content, site registration and ultimately subscription.
The strategy followed a three-fold approach. The Economist first used digital display with provocative headlines to show its insightful take on unexpected topics. It then targeted the intellectually curious as they investigated these subjects, linking to articles on economist.com from places the audience already found their current affairs. Finally it developed an innovative ‘next best’ content model to present personally targeted articles.
The team used intricate data, analytics and insight alongside the publication’s sophisticated resources to create smooth, highly targeted prospect journeys all the way from rival current affairs sources through to subscription to The Economist.
Creativity
Under the premise ‘There is nothing more provocative than the truth’, the team used The Economist’s characteristic wit to produce more than 60 headlines for online ads. Many were written in near real-time, from The Economist’s live newsroom and editorial meetings, as major stories broke. Targeting delivered The Economist articles to seven distinct audience segments.
Multiple data points informed Facebook and Twitter activity, supplying in-Feed ads on mobile without interrupting users’ flow.
ShareThrough and Outbrain gave a long tail of interest through quality brands like CNN and Wall Street Journal. Dynamic advertising built additional ads in real- time, matching page context and viewer profile to thousands of articles, infographics and reports.
The campaign then nudged readers to register and subscribe, with a decision tree delivering content in sequence to prospects, and learning which topics, in which order, generated the warmest prospects.
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 firm foundation 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 rose 22% and willingness to recommend went up by 10%.
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