News Corp is set to kick-off a brand campaign for its digital subscription offerings in order to raise awareness and hopefully acquisition, and it's brought along some famous Aussie faces to front the push.
Barry Humphries and his alter egos, Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson, are fronting the campaign where they outline the features of the tablet and mobile editions of the publishers metro mastheads, The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, The Courier-Mail and The Advertiser.
The campaign goes live this Sunday and speaking to AdNews ahead of the launch, News Corp's managing director metro and regional publishing Damian Eales, said this is a timely opportunity to spread the message about the publisher's mobile and tablet offerings.
The campaign was created by Archibald Williams, with Eales telling AdNews that the campaign marks a multimillion-dollar investment from News to promote its digital products and subscriptions.
“We just launched our new mobile version of our daily editions and we thought it was a great opportunity to reinvigorate our tablet apps,” he said.
The spots that also feature former Miss Universe Australia and Myer ambassador Jennifer Hawkins, aim to make product demonstration fun, with Sir Les even managing to juggle a beer at the races at the same time as trawling through News Corp's tablet app.
Of the publishers ambassador choice Eales said: “We spoke to Barry their manager some time back, he's been a friend of News Corp and he's an avid consumer of our products and he spoke to his two clients Sir Les Patterson and Dame Edna and between them all they decided this was a campaign they wanted to be apart of and we were just delighted.
“They are undoubtedly living national treasures and it was terrific to get them to have some fun with our campaign,” he added.
Matt Gilmour, executive creative director for Archibald Williams said: “The opportunity to work with an icon like Barry Humphries was incredible, the man has been entertaining the world for decades and he’s as sharp as ever. On a personal note, I’m particularly excited to see Sir Les on our screens again.”
The ads aren't just about having fun, with Eales noting that this brand campaign aims to drives awareness and ultimately acquisitions.
“[We] intend drive acquisition. We're expecting there to be an increase in the new subscribers we generate for our business. We know that the use of our tablet apps improves retention, our objective through this campaign is to get all our customer who haven’t yet trialled out tablet apps or mobile apps to actually trial it and in edition to that we want customers to use it on an ongoing basis.”
News Corp doesn't currently reveal its digital subscriber numbers for all its titles and the publisher also doesn't shed any light on the number of apps that have been downloaded and the numbers of new subscribers that News hopes to generate from this campaign. However Eales said digital subscriptions makes up a large proportion of News's subscriber base.
“[Digital is] a core component of our value proposition, one of the most used ways of consuming our media and news coverage.
“We're very happy with the growth of our digital subscription base. It is offsetting any decline we've seen in print audiences and we think that will continue to occur. Our job is to serve the best content from the best journos in the business to our customers, no matter what platform they consume it on,” he added.
Eales also confirmed to AdNews that both MediaCom and UM worked on the campaign. With UM being responsible for the digital buying and MediaCom looking after TV and outdoor.
The ads will span social, digital, TV and print with the ads being targeted to the main metro centres of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide for eight weeks from this Sunday.
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