Mission is the message in The Guardian's new marketing campaign
Mission is the message in The Guardian's new marketing campaign
Hello again everyone,
In the latest Crawford Media podcast, Guardian Australia and New Zealand Managing Director Dan Stinton reveals the creative messaging of a big marketing campaign that he hopes will reach “that half of the country who haven’t heard of us”. That message, as you might guess, revolves around the Guardian’s social justice credentials: “In the fight for progress, news needs a Guardian.”
The Guardian will be taking out TV commercials, billboards and cinema spots, so you’re sure to encounter the campaign soon. This kind of multi-million dollar marketing investment is essential for a business that - as Stinton points out in the podcast - needs to focus more and more on the “top of the funnel”. That is, on the expensive, high-profile advertising that is conventionally used to build brand awareness. Stinton says the days of news publishers being involved in "direct response" advertising are over. This is bottom-of-the-funnel stuff, the transactional advertising that digital platforms do better for cheaper than news companies ever will.
The reveal
While I was interviewing Stinton, he didn't initially want to reveal the details of his new marketing campaign. After I guessed that it revolved around trust, he opened up. The trust angle is an important one for established news brands and in my experience is the go to when you need something to say about your brand. But how well does it actually work? Do you people believe you when you say "trust me"? In personal relationships, usually the opposite is true: what's your reaction when someone accosts you with a "trust me" and a toothy smile?
Prior knowledge of the brand is the key here, and my feeling is that probably, trust is just a hook that news directors and desperate marketers hang on to for lack of alternatives. News is for the most part commodity content, and while compelling and important, there's rarely a bright line where one day you have a product with a completely new proposition for consumers. So it's hard to get a new hook.
This year's Digital News Report from the University of Canberra shows that 30% of Australians actively distrust news in general. That's a massive chunk of the population who are going to be actively hostile to overt trust messaging. I'm not sure from our conversation whether The Guardian will explicitly mention "trust" in any of the ads, but I think it's a good thing the word is missing from the main tagline Stinton mentioned to me.
The mission is the message
The Guardian receives around 60% of its revenue from readers, and the majority of that money comes from contributors. These are people who believe in The Guardian's mission and want to support it. They don't have to give, they choose to give, and as I discussed with former Guardian marketing director Margy Vary last year, this reinforces the publisher's need to live and breathe the mission. In industry analysis, I place The Guardian in a group with subscription businesses like the SMH, The Age and The Australian, and I think the forces at play for this group are actually pushing them to more strident ideological positions. It's clear that contributors and many subscribers pay because they identify with the mission, which constitutes a big motivation to restrict contrary viewpoints and feed the beast. Only about 2% of The Guardian's readers contribute: but they are the 2% that really matter financially.
See this piece I wrote for The Spinoff about this "mission fever" phenomenon and the evidence of its impact in New Zealand news.
Why two updates?
I apologise for having to send you two newsletter updates in one day, it's the way Substack handles podcasts: if I want to both publish a podcast and say something substantial about it, I have to write a separate newsletter.
That's it from the very soggy Crawford Media HQ. The rain just keeps coming down, and my thoughts go out to those who are vacating their flooded homes as we speak. We have the good fortune to live on a steep hill,
Hal