“The numbers speak for themselves” is the concept behind Toronto ad agency HQvB’s new ad campaign for Newspapers Canada, which represents over 830 newspapers across Canada.
There’s been a lot of doom and gloom about newspapers, but the print medium is far from dead, said John Hinds, president and CEO of Newspapers Canada. “Canadians are reading newspapers. The genesis of this campaign is that the facts speak for themselves, and people just need to ‘do the math’ of our research to see the truth of this.”
“A large part of our audience is our own media. As such, one of our objectives was to show print journalists that the print medium is alive and well. The extremely high readership numbers make a strong case. We’ve seen huge growth in Canadian community, transit, and free dailies. Overall readership is also growing in digital and mobile,” said Hinds.
Given its relatively small budget, Newspapers Canada doesn’t have an agency of record, however, this is the second broad-readership campaign HQvB has done for the organization. Last fall, the agency did the re-branding of the Canadian Newspaper Association as Newspapers Canada, including revamping its logo and website.
The new campaign is something of a departure from previous work, which focused on newspapers as a trusted medium – the credibility of print.
“Newspapers Canada had shown us a whole bunch of research to demonstrate the efficacy of advertising in newspapers,” said HQvB Partner Andy Shortt. “We thought that we could have some fun with the math. We’re really aiming the work at media agencies specifically, which are numbers-oriented anyway.”
The creative has been launched online, with a full-scale print roll-out of seven or eight ads over the next two weeks. The campaign will run over the course of this year.
Online ads are appearing on trade publications sites like Marketingmag.ca as well as MediaInCanada.com and Infopresse.com, and on the Newspapers Canada website.
