THE demise of Ansett last month was nothing, if not sudden.
So much so, that the Qantas offer to honour Ansett passengers’ tickets missed the deadline to get into the national papers, and yet the carrier had an urgent need to circulate the message.
While it would be early afternoon by the time the airline could get the message out using other media, it seems that for once, the Internet was the only appropriate medium for the job.
According to F2 general manager marketing and CRM Dale McCarthy, Qantas was able to take advantage of the online network’s recent policy changes to allow advertisers to “own” the front page of its online newspapers for the day.
“After taking the call at 9.15 am, by 11 am f2 had built for Qantas a number of special ‘announcement’ ads that linked to an ‘announcement’ Web page and had these ads running across the F2 Network's news sites,” she said.
The ad formats used in the campaign included banners, vertical columns and island ads placed primarily on the news sites, front pages and within articles.
“Internet news sites are one of the only mass media forms that reach people everyday in the workplace.” McCarthy said.
“The peak time for this usage is in the mornings, when people first arrive at work, at lunchtime and then last thing in the day, before they head home.
“Three unique points of contact in the work environment, a place where only newspapers had ever managed to penetrate before.”
“We suspect this will be the first of many uses by advertisers that need to produce highly responsive messages in reactions to situations of corporate emergency, like product tampering, or, in reaction to competitor activity, like competitor collapses.”
