2001 BEST USE OF NEWSPAPERS WINNER
WINNING ENTRY - 'Inserting' a Result Through Newspapers
COMPANY - bellamyhayden
CLIENT - Yahoo! Australia & NZ
SPONSORED BY
OBJECTIVE
Facing a lack of consumer confidence in online transactions, and with a budget of just $450,000, Yahoo! Shopping set out to use the pre-Christmas period as an opportunity to drive traffic to its site. Its objectives were simple: increase registrations, unique users and page views.
CAMPAIGN
In what could have potentially been a risky decision, Bellamy Hayden chose to use newspapers, a strategy at odds with Yahoo's corporate culture ("yesteryear" rather than "tomorrow"). Media buyer Zenith Media spent the entire $220,000 budget on four Harvey Norman-style inserts in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age in Melbourne and The Courier Mail in Brisbane over four weeks, and two inserts in The Newcastle Herald, The Illawarra Mercury and The Canberra Times over two weeks. The inserts aimed to highlight the similarities Yahoo! Shopping had to traditional retailers, and on no account make it look like a dot-com advertiser.
RESULTS
In the month of the campaign (November) new registrations on the Yahoo! Shopping site increased 134%, weekly unique users increased 41% and weekly page views increased 93%. These figures carried over to some degree into December also. Managing director Nic Jones commented: "In the last week of November 2000 alone, Yahoo! Australia and NZ Shopping did more transactions than in the whole of December 1999."
