Discovery and Activation
How do you reintroduce your major market newspaper to a population that has been trained to distrust “fake news” from both sides of the aisle?
You ask. And you listen.
It had been over 10 years since The Dallas Morning News’ last ad campaign. So we decided to reintroduce ourselves by going into the community and asking our citizens what matters to them. By understanding what really matters to our community, we can, in turn, deliver real local journalism to our city.
Our first goal was to rally our base – our employees. We asked them what matters to them and why they have dedicated themselves to a journalistic career, then created a launch event, complete with swag and posters that told their peers why their job matters.
We then took it to the streets of North Texas. We created a giant chalkboard and held a series of “pop-up” events where North Texans could tell us what matters. We provided free coffee, newspapers and digital subscriptions, because caffeine definitely matters.
We listened to our citizens and archived all of their responses to create a campaign that answered what they told us mattered to them. We strategically put those messages on relevant mediums and let their words do the talking.
We created a branded lock-up combining people’s handwriting to fill in the blank and The Dallas Morning News’ masthead font for “matters.” We then tagged the campaign with “Real. Local. Journalism.” and reintroduced ourselves to North Texas.