SPRING 2016_PROMOTING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF PRINT MEDIA THROUGHOUT EUROPE
The beautiful game
Why print will be one of the stars of Euro 2016
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BRAND IN THE HAND Why content marketing is the success story of 2016 TRUSTED, ENGAGING, EFFECTIVE The enduring appeal of newspapers for advertisers SURPRISE THE SENSES Give your marketing the wow factor with special inks and finishes THE DIGITAL BACKLASH Will print get a boost from privacy concerns and adblocking?
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Size is everything In a media world dominated by 140-character copy and quick bursts of content, there’s a new-found love of long-form journalism and marketing. We travel to Berlin, Paris, London and New York to discover why the media world likes to go long
— By Paul Simpson
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/ LONGFORM MARKETING
WHO HAS TIME to read these days? In an age when we are bombarded with up to 5,000 commercial messages in a typical day, when 7,094 tweets are sent every second and we spend so much time on our smartphones we now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish (it takes us eight seconds before we lose concentration, the fish last nine), it seems a minor miracle that any of us pick up a newspaper. In this context, it seems even more of a miracle that longform journalism and marketing are staging a significant comeback. A series of ads from Tate Britain in London Underground stations recently engaged travellers with poetic copy about some of their most famous works of art, while online mattress retailer Eve ran a simple 150-word ad on posters and in print publications. “People will read what interests them and there’s no reason on earth why that can’t be an ad,” said Paul Belford, founder of Paul Belford Ltd, the ad agency that created the advert. “It’s simply down to the promise of what the reader will discover and how interesting the writing is.” In journalism, the British quarterly Delayed Gratification, which boasts about “being last to the news”, is one of the most visible symbols of the longform renaissance.
Yet its success has been mirrored elsewhere by the launch of specialist titles such as So Foot, the vibrant French football monthly, and 11 Freunde, devoted to the same sport in Germany, and by the renewed commercial and fi nancial vigour of The New Yorker, one of the oldest, longform magazines in the world, which posted its highest-ever paid circulation of 1.05 million last year. The long and short of it In many ways, the revival of longform journalism and marketing is a return to traditional media. Some of the most famous print adverts ever created – such as the 1915 Cadillac ad, The Penalty Of Leadership, which stretched to 414 words – have taken their time to make their point. In the 1960s, when Esquire magazine published all 13,781 words of Norman Mailer’s story on JFK, longform was the norm. Yet as TV snatched a greater share of ad spend, publishing budgets shrank and space for such editorial marathons became scarce. In 1982, Gannett’s launch of USA Today prefigured the Buzzlist editorial culture of the internet offering ‘McNuggets’ of news for time-poor readers. In the AngloAmerican media, the new fashion was for brevity, clarity and easy access points, a strategy that culminated in the launch of the i newspaper in 2010 which will survive as a printed product under new owners Johnston Press.
No limits journalism Yet in truth, this was never the whole story. In Germany in 2000, when print was deemed to have a viable future and long reads had not fallen out of fashion, two football supporters Philipp Köster and Reinaldo Coddou H. launched a fanzine called 11 Freunde (11 Friends), with a circulation of 3,000 copies. Ten years later, the magazine was doing well enough for Gruner + Jahr, part of Bertelsmann, to acquire a 51% stake. Christoph Biermann, 11 Freunde’s deputy editor, says the magazine has never worried about the McNugget editorial formula: “We have long reads and very short elements, but from research we know that our readers like to spend time with the magazine. It’s about entering the 11 Freunde world. It’s easy running long stories because we know our readers love them – if they’re good. That’s why we don’t have a maximum word count.” Research shows that 56% of the magazine’s readers prefer reading long stories in print (just as well, since some stories run over 4,000 words). The magazine has its own idiosyncratic agenda and doesn’t slavishly pursue the latest stars, transfers or results. Underpinning its continued success is the fact that, Biermann says: “Our approach hasn’t changed since we started. It’s not really an editorial philosophy but I think readers feel that we really like football and our jobs.”
ROBERT LEWANDOWSKI SERGE AURIER ROBERTO DONADONI LARS ELSTRUP
L’INTERVIEW DE OUF
EL-HADJI DIOUF “Les gens m’appellent ‘Son Excellence’”
Strong and very long (left to right) German football monthly 11 Freunde, its deputy editor Christoph Biermann, and French football magazine So Foot
L’AFFAIRE
FIORESE
FRANCE MÉTROPOLITAINE 4,50 € / DOM 7,20 € / BEL – LUX – ESP – GRÈCE – POR 6,20 € / UK 4 £ / SUISSE 9 CHF / ALL – ITAL 7,90 € / MAROC 50 MAD / TUN 9 TND
LE
VRAI RONALDO VRAI BRÉSIL RACONTE LE
interview gros cuissots +avec Roberto Carlos
les dessous de son kidnapping ROCKY, PODEMOS & EURO
KOKE
rencontre avec un joueur qui se défonce ILS ONT FUI
DAECH & BACHAR
une semaine avec la sélection de Syrie libre
N°134 – MARS 2016
ENTRETIEN FENOMENAL
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“I like the idea of something that gives you a chance to step back, because we’re so programmed into thinking about now” Dan Hagen, chief strategy officer at Carat UK The French connection A similarly enthusiastic vibe inspired the launch of So Foot in France in 2003. Franck Annese was editing the cultural magazine Sofa when his colleagues jokingly dared him to launch a magazine about football. He accepted the challenge, creating a magazine that was successful enough to provide the foundation of independent media group So Presse, which has since launched movie mag So Film and last year, in its biggest gamble, a news fortnightly called Society. Annese sums up the company’s editorial creed as “It’s all about the three H’s: history, human interest and humour.” “It sounds incredibly cheesy,” Annese says, “but we laugh every day in the office.” That fanzine spirit infuses – and distinguishes – So Press’s magazines. One French sports journalist says: “What they have shown is that there’s not a crisis in print media in France, there is a crisis of originality – too many magazines do the same thing, at the same time, year after year.” So Press and 11 Freunde are not alone. Convinced there are riches in niches, longform football mags – often built on a subscription model – are now flourishing in the UK (The Blizzard), the US (Howler, 8X8), the Netherlands (Panenka) and Sweden (Offside). These all exist online and in print, as does The New Yorker. In the US, the fashion for longform has inspired the launch – and closure
– of many online journals. Some were pure vanity projects but some such as Narratively (tagline “ordinary people with extraordinary stories”), general interest sites Matter and The Big Roundtable have endured. Project management software company Basecamp launched a longform mag for SMEs, The Distance, in 2014, later turning it into a podcast (which is, in essence, another kind of longform.) What’s in it for brands? Dan Hagen, chief strategy officer at Carat UK, is a subscriber to Delayed Gratification. “I like the idea of something that gives you a chance to step back," he says, "because we’re so programmed into thinking about now.” Advertisers, he believes, could turn to titles with a certain pedigree and scale. It will take years for any of the launches to begin to emulate The New Yorker, but that title’s return to splendour shows what can be done. Hagen also believes that advertisers could also benefit from ‘brand rub’, where the context, content and feel of a longform magazine rubs off on the ads within it, reinforcing their message by association with the publication. "This effect is particularly powerful," he says, "because, as surveys repeatedly show, consumers trust adverts in printed matter far more than ads online or on their smartphone."
The value of longform Some of these publications don’t accept adverts, but for Hagen, this could be a blessing in disguise. “We need to move beyond a legacy mindset where adverts are part of the price the consumer pays to watch TV or buy a magazine to something more dynamic," he says. "So, for example, look at how we, as advertisers and brands, can provide content that adds to the value of the editorial proposition.” Longform may always remain a niche, but Hagen can see a role for it in the marketing mix: “A lot of advertising is about the need to remind people you’re there. So if you’re Red Bull, for example, you need to go on TV every so often to be sure you’re front of mind.” Yet Red Bull does lots of other stuff that underlines the brand’s association with adrenaline, action and adventure with targeted audiences and, Hagen says, “If you’re really good, those two strands complement each other.” Michael Brunt, chief marketing officer of The Economist, believes that: “People will keep valuing the experience of holding a print magazine in their hands. In the next few years, print publications will become increasingly identified as affordable luxury items.” If Brunt is right, longform journalism could help the best publications stand out as desirable and affordable luxuries.
“People will keep valuing the experience of holding a print magazine in their hands. In the next few years, print publications will become increasingly identified as affordable luxury items” Michael Brunt, chief marketing officer of The Economist
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/ LONGFORM MARKETING The long view Four longform adverts that broke the rules
Minds for Minds This clever ad, created by Whybin/TBWA, switches between the mind of an autistic person (the words in black) and that of a scientist studying the disease (the blue type), in a campaign that built awareness and raised donations for research into the mental condition in New Zealand. Cadbury Wispa Fondly recalling the 1980s, an age when hair and shoulder pads were big and swimming trunks were small, this ad celebrated the resurrection of the Cadbury Wispa bar, back by public demand in 2007 after being canned in 2003. Cadbury’s test run of 23m bars sold so well the brand’s return was made permanent.
Jungle Sound Studios The copy for this ear-catching ad is 613 words long, but agency TBWA pushed the envelope by recording each word as a voiceover and then printing them as soundwaves, bolstering Jungle’s reputation as one of the most innovative sound design studios in the UK. The real text for this 2015 ad starts: “Not to boast or anything but if you can read this you probably work at Jungle.”
XO Beer To prove a point to clients who thought print was dead, Neil French, one of the great longform copywriters, created the fictional beer brand XO and promoted it with quirky ads likening the taste to being “slightly nicer” than “being struck behind the ear with a sockful of wet sand”. Consumers flocked to shops and bars to buy the beer, only to discover it never existed. As French says: “Barmen were even assaulted for not stocking it.” He proved his point handsomely.
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