i-level grows The Sun to win NMA Effectiveness Award

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New Media Age

28/06/2007

The Sun had a typically tabloid target of ‘You want The Sun. Come and get sun’ to increase visitor numbers and stickiness at the relaunch of thesun.co.uk and make it the number-one online newspaper in the UK.

The target audience was not the typical Sun reader, but ‘banter lads’ – 18-35-year-old ABC1 men interested in socialising, gaming and downloadable content – and ‘gossip girls’ – 18-35-year-old ABC1 women interested in socialising and interactive content.

i-level decided to focus on the heritage of The Sun newspaper to talk to the target demographic and used the newspaper’s iconic headlines to form the basis of the campaign. It planned to run ads that dynamically generated headlines and destination URLs to match article pages. Euro RSCG designed and built the ads and an interface between Tangozebra and the client so they could update an RSS feed with the new headlines that would in turn update the ads.

Behavioural targeting was then overlaid onto this to exclude people who had already been visiting thesun.co.uk, to broaden the audience and maximise the number of unique users.

ComScore statistics show that thesun.co.uk has experienced higher growth than any other online paper and receives more visitors than any of its tabloid rivals, up 86% year on year. 840,000 daily unique users were driven to the site in five and a half months, and each visitor returned 1.3 times after their initial visit. Average weekly click-throughs for the campaign regularly exceeded 1% and have reached 12% on occasion. The continual beating of the target for cost per unique arrival at the site saved more than £550,000 on media spend.

The judges said the campaign was well targeted, lively and very exciting. They praised the brilliant execution and said that it was obvious a lot of thought had gone into using headlines to drive targeted and relevant customers to the site.

For more information on the awards, see www.nmaawards.co.uk