Earlier this month, News Corp kicked off its D_Coded digital pitch to media buyers across the country.
Chief among the announcements was AVOD player Tubi joining the Australian market, with News Corp handling the ad sales.
It also announced a host of improvements and automations for its Intent Connect buying platform. However, much of the show revolved around client case studies, demonstrating the success of News’ offering over the year. Inspiring Vacations was one such business that had seen impressive results from working with News Corp on its campaigns.
But its results, as Emily Ross, News Corp’s head of travel explained to B&T was about the harmonious marriage of print and digital, rather than digital alone.
“Something I’m really proud of is the continued strength in our print proposition and our product,” Ross said.
“D_Coded is our digital component but News Corp as a business has assets and strengths in a lot of areas and print alone over-delivered basically on every single benchmark.”
Inspiring Vacations is a longstanding News Corp partner but Ross explained that it needed to “get ahead of the competition” in its search for new customers but was also looking for an “opportunity to find new performance channels to promote their deals”.
This new campaign started with four weeks of twice-weekly print ads run in News’ metro mastheads in an effort to prove what print could achieve on its own. The second phase of the campaign ran directly after, with the print run continuing, but with added dedicated articles about deals roundups on news.com.au and escape.com.au, as well as high-impact media targeting existing audiences and social display.
“On top of that, we had a robust amplification plan of the content we were creating, knowing that our content is extremely engaging, but we just gave it that little extra push through social, EDMs and so on to put the full gamut of News Corp around it,” said Ross.
The results were strong. News’ ecommerce work generated a nine times ROI, four times higher brand preference, a 30 per cent increase in purchase intent and consideration tripled. It’s a strategy that demonstrates the power of a multi-channel approach. But while the digital components offered the benefits of more measurable conversions, the campaign would not have had the same success were it not for News’ print titles, according to Ross.
“What as really great was seeing complementary results, where print delivered amazingly in some areas and then digital delivered amazingly in other areas. They have their strengths in different areas,” she said.
“That’s still really important that print gets the phone ringing. Print still does drive bookings, conversions, enquiries. Digital reinforces a lot of that so you can be more agile.”
At the same, Ross conceded that News didn’t do “anything super new or different” with its print ads for Inspiring Vacations. It did try to find distinctiveness with the media plan, placing the ads on Mondays and Tuesdays in print. Consumers tend to be looking for holidays at the start of the week as they dream of getting away from the desk.
“Print we know on its own holds a lot of strength. Where we did see some differences was the use of different channels at different stages of the funnel. We also saw booking intent when added digital to print lifted by 33 per cent—stronger bottom-funnel outcomes,” she said, adding that print delivers on all areas of the funnel.
Perhaps Ross’ greatest takeaway was that the campaign—essentially a well-invested test-and-learn—could only be enacted because of News’ strong relationship with Inspiring Vacations and its agency, C3.
“There’s a lot of trust between us and the client. The three parties are continually coming together, we’re not just working via the agency, it’s very collaborative. It makes a really big difference when we’re doing test-and-learns like this,” she said.
That trust could come down to the attribution that News is able to offer. Ross noted that there is a “big push” in the travel category for everything to be “measurable and attributable and to require little resource to manage”.
“Our clients know that when they add print to something, it will supercharge the results. As soon as they remove it, they can see it decline. Print is the perfect team player in terms of media in general but it’s things like enquiries, QR code scans, call centre volumes and ultimately sales and bookings that our clients collectively tell us [matters],” she added.
Roy Morgan reckons that punters are returning to traditional news media, with Ross believing that consumers are looking for expertise—particularly in the travel space.
“They want trusted information from people who have seen, done and written about it. They want to see information from people like them as well and there’s definitely a balance, but everyone always comes back to expertise. That’s what we’re able to offer,” she said.
Perhaps reports of print’s death have been greatly exaggerated, yet again.
