Catching ’em young seemed a good principle for Germany’s FAZ… but only 40 per cent of a target audience had heard of the paper.

In an INMA Ideas blog, paywall head Donika Lilova and campaigning chief Daniela Parr explain that the motive behind the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung campaign was to acquire young subscribers to boost awareness as a relevant news brand among the 25-35-year-old audience.

“Our hypothesis is that once this target group gets acquainted with our website product and content, and builds a habit around news consumption as text, audio, or video content, they will remain faithful users throughout their business and private lives,” they say.

A study of the the target group showed only four out of ten had heard of the news brand. “These young people usually have short timespans to stay informed, which is why there is a greater need for snackable content.”

Most consume news media on the go: while they are commuting to work or occasionally during their daily breaks and in the evening. “The question we – along with many other publishers – were asking ourselves, was how to boost our relevance within this interesting target group without changing our core DNA.

“Our mission is to be the medium that illuminates different opinions in a well-founded and unbiased way and thus helps young people to find their own position. We found this claim so universal that we decided to build our marketing activities around it.”

The idea of pluralism – “at the centre of our very existence as a newspaper” – was the basis for the broad-based, multi-channel digital campaign. “We present two opposing opinions on a current topic and ask: What do you think? Thus, we encourage young people to form their own unbiased opinions.

“We used real-time marketing to tailor the ads to the editorial environment and pick up on the article’s topic. We used topics that were trending among our younger readership: environmental issues, political trends, the war in Ukraine, etc.

“We also provided an attractive offer for the younger audience with a discount of 50 per cent. With that, we decided it is more clever to become a small part of somebody’s share of wallet when it comes to consumption of movies, music, media, and news rather than not to be part of it at all.”

The campaign was evaluated according to the key performance indicators that measured it not only in terms of subscription numbers but also in terms of awareness and reach.

“It was vital for us to gain more impressions at the top of the funnel so we could convert more users to a subscription. In the end, it really worked out for us,” they say.

“We gained many more impressions than initially planned with exposure across paid channels and social media, placement in our owned channels, and on our news website, increasing awareness by 263 per cent. We knew that our target group consumes media content mainly on mobile devices. That’s why we concentrated our activities on the mobile web and increased the mobile conversion rate by 391 per cent.

Real-time marketing allows for ads that are precisely tailored to the editorial environment and pick up on the topic of the article.

“Although many users consume us as snackable content, there are also users checking on news throughout their work routines. That’s why we decided from the very beginning to make relevant placements within the stationary context of our website and across other channels.

“It surely paid off for us: We increased our stationary conversion rate by 198 per cent.

“We decided not only to measure performance indicators but also to ask our readers again in a quantitative study what our brand awareness among the target group was after the campaign.

“We were astonished by the results: Seven out of ten young readers were aware of us after the campaign. Our goal is now to carry out campaigns like this on a regular basis.”