Where You Live

The Where You Live campaign featured weekly illustrations of landmarks and skylines from McClatchy’s communities to appeal to potential subscribers. As the company’s first unified marketing effort, it united all campaigns under a cohesive theme and strategy, to improve marketing impact and production efficiency.

The Pismo Beach Pier in San Luis Obispo. This themed illustration was used in the Unwind Where You Live creative.

Team

  • Art Director, animator, illustrator of half the locations (It’s me, Holly Braford!)

  • Marketing director

  • Copywriter

  • Five additional illustrators of 2 locations each

  • Illustrator of 8 locations, email developer and designer

  • Email Deployment Specialist

The challenge

McClatchy’s marketing campaigns lacked cohesion. Separate teams created creative for each market, leading to inefficiencies, inconsistent branding and missed opportunities.

Past efforts, such as Columbus Day or Friday the 13th promotions, relied on one-off designs that failed to reflect McClatchy’s brand, connect with readers or justify the resources invested.

The company needed a way to unify all 30 McClatchy markets under a single concept and appeal to its readers where they live.

The approach

Research and strategy

I used McClatchy’s typologies and subscription-motivation studies to shape the strategy and theme of the campaign. Local and community was the biggest motivation to subscribe.

Custom skylines and landmarks

I created half of the campaign’s 30 vector skylines, while collaborating with a team of illustrators who contributed the remaining designs (8 by another illustrator, 2 each by five others). The campaign needed to address the diversity of McClatchy’s markets. Cities like Miami, Sacramento and Kansas City have iconic skylines, while smaller markets like Beaufort required creative problem-solving to represent its local identity.

Beaufort, South Carolina’s beaches were the landmark we chose to illustrate that community.

Scalable Design

I built a flexible illustration system with reusable components to streamline collaboration and ensure visual consistency. This allowed the other illustrators to quickly create high-quality designs while maintaining the campaign’s aesthetic.

Another illustrator on the project was able to create this image of Bellingham, Wash. with the illustration system. They were able to focus on the detail of the Whatcom Museum instead of making decisions on the trees, clouds and sky.

Animation

Previous research indicated that including gifs in emails significantly increased subscription rates, making this a critical element of the campaign’s success. I animated assets for five weeks of emails across all 30 markets, producing 150 gifs in total. These animations highlighted key CTAs and visuals in a subtle yet engaging way. 

The animation for the Hilton Head, South Carolina July 4 creative.

Unified strategy across channels

Where You Live also unified creative across marketing channels. The theme was applied across email, social media, digital ads, and internal programs like Newspapers in Education. 

728x90 ad for the Sacramento Bee’s Newspapers in Education program.

Copy

Weekly emails featured a series of 13 action-oriented verbs  like “Explore,” “Discover,” “Belong” paired with the skylines and landmarks to create a dynamic experience for potential subscribers.

An email that promoted the News & Observer subscription with a view of Raleigh, North Carolina.

Cross-disciplinary coordination

Where You Live also connected our team internally. This was the first time many of us worked together on a campaign and it seemed on theme that the team was located across five different McClatchy markets. 

A Kansas City Star email in the Where You Live campaign. Create Where You Live featured 30 watercolor versions of the market illustrations.

The results

Increased subscriptions

The campaign drove a significant increase in digital subscriptions, with gains in revenue and readers. The July 4 email alone brought in more subscribers than the previous year’s entire month of July.

Improved efficiency

There were more than 400 unique campaign assets created for Where You Live. This could not have happened without the operations improvements we made. The team was able to learn from this process and continue to improve it as it went along.

Enhanced Collaboration

This campaign kicked off themed, company-wide campaigns going forward and strengthened the bonds of our new cross-disciplinary team.

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