Together campaign
During the holidays, the Together marketing campaign celebrated McClatchy newsrooms’ rich history in their communities. The campaign tied each market's legacy to the present with a showcase of archival photos and use of custom typography.
Team
Art director, designer (Me, Holly Braford)
Copywriter
Creative specialist (developed email, created and duplicated ads)
Email deployment specialist
The challenge
McClatchy’s holiday campaigns previously relied on generic holiday imagery unrelated to its news product or its coverage areas. For 2019, the priority was to highlight each newsroom’s deep community connection, leveraging its archive as a powerful storytelling tool.
An archive photo from the project.
The approach
Image curation
The Together process began in spring 2019 when I collected more than 100 archival photos from the 28 McClatchy newsrooms that received marketing. The coordination was a challenge as many of the archives had not yet been digitized, not maintained or were donated to local libraries. I created a system to manage the assets as they came in over the next eight months and organized them according to market and weekly send.
At left, typography from Skip to my Lou, Girl Scout 1958 songbook that inspired the custom logo for Together, at right.
Custom logo
I created a custom logo and used a mid-century modern color palette to continue to build on the nostalgia theme.
User-centered design
The team applied insights from a recent user study to design a clear and up-front price point in email. The same user interviews and performance data guided a CTA strategy with clear actions in primary and secondary buttons.
Creative and deployment strategy
The team designed 1,000+ assets for the acquisition and subscriber campaigns. The emails, direct and social ads maintained a unified Together theme for Halloween, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, and New Year’s.
The team worked with dynamic tags to streamline the email process. We used one email template for all markets. The tags pulled in everything from images to publication founded date in the copy.
Custom elements
Subtle animated design details around CTAs drew attention without feeling intrusive.
Adding gifs to either side of the buttons was a challenge, but our email developer nailed it.
The Results
12% lift: The campaign drove an increase in email subscriptions in Q4 2019 and the beginning of 2020.
Broad reach: The assets were deployed across email, display, and social in 28 markets.
Subscriber engagement: The campaign visuals also enhanced subscriber communications.
