The Independent Says The Future Is Digital
Last night I had the pleasure of hearing David Greene, Marketing and Circulation Director of leading UK paper, The Independent discuss the newspaper’s digital marketing strategy and its impact on the brand.
The event, organised by Manchester’s Creative Industry Development Service (CIDS), and chaired by Danny Meaney, Managing Director of nmp Ltd, took place in Manchester’s Museum of Science & Industry and also featured a presentation by Sean Singleton, Managing Director of Skive, creative digital agency for The Independent, Gillette, McDonalds, Reebok, BP, Motorola and quite a few others.
David’s talk was highly informative and provided an insight into the effect the digital revolution is having on press and other traditional forms of media in the UK.
He took us through a typical promotion for The Independent, showing the various formats used to market various editorial promotions; from birdsong CD giveaways to puzzle magazines all the way to indie music compilation CDs and ‘Improve Your Photography’ (or English or Spanish or Italian) CD courses.
Most UK consumers will be familiar with the practice of getting freebies with their weekend paper and indeed some international readers may recall the fuss made over Prince’s tie up with the Daily Mail when he gave away full length copies of his last album.
These promotions are critical to the circulation figures for national newspapers and form an integral part of the brand experience for many UK readers.
David shared that each promotion has a dedicated advertising budget which includes TV, radio and various digital promotions mostly through ‘viral’ online games.
The Independent’s marketing budget is around £10 million per year and is heavily focused towards tactical promotions such as the ones already described. They are designed to create circulation revenue and achieve ABC distribution figures.
David was an engaging speaker and his mini-rant against ‘new media agencies’ drew the loudest laughs of the evening. In his experience, the attitude at many new media agencies is to pull out the earphones reluctantly whenever asked to do something and respond about “how it might take a week to do it”.
He said he felt there was “an element of looking down at traditional media” but that few online publishers could deliver the turnaround times traditional media like TV and radio could provide.
I take this to mean that that whilst it is relatively easy to order a TV ad campaign at fairly short notice (i.e. within days), most online publishers work on a fairly rigid schedule with advertising campaigns planned and booked up months in advance.
That said, he was very bullish about the importance of digital as part of the marketing mix and said that rather than being an adjunct of the physical paper, The Independent’s website at independent.co.uk is now seen as “a way to extend the offering beyond the paper” and a mechanism for attracting a whole new community to the paper that was not necessarily based around the broadsheet.
He predicted that digital would grow to form 21% of the marketing budget in 2 years, up from 5% at present, which I thought was incredible.
He was also full of facts and figures about the success of the viral element of The Independent’s digital promotions; apparently they regularly achieve redemption rates of up to 60,000, which is impressive.
Digital promotions delivered through their email newsletters get click through rates of 35-45% and have an open rate of 52%, pretty astounding in fact, particularly considering industry click through rates for banner adverts are historically in the low single digit figures.
When I asked him about The Independent’s strategy for reaching “the Facebook and YouTube generation” he was forthright about wanting to do more “but was not sure how”.
I’m confident that he and his team will figure that out in coming months if only because The Independent has a strong student following, largely because it creates an edition aimed squarely at the student market .
I’m sure that as the paper experiments with various forms of interactive and digital marketing campaigns, from podcasts and video podcasts to more immersive ‘viral’ games, he will see his wish for digital to supersede TV in effectiveness happen sooner rather than later.
I also really enjoyed Sean Singleton’s presentation about his work at Skive and made lots of notes too, will blog about that if anyone asks…
Anyone else at the event on Wednesday want to share notes? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
Now, on to the next instalment of the social media and FTSE 100 companies study…
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