Readers today consume news in more formats and across more platforms than ever before, and their expectations for relevance continue to rise. We saw a chance to meet that shift with something more ambitious than traditional creative production.

By building a marketing approach powered by our journalism, we could innovate while introducing more readers to the reporting and perspectives that define The Washington Post.

The need for more assets, and continuous diversification of creative messaging and formats, is exponentially increasing following a surge of sophisticated algorithmic and audience targeting tools from platforms like Meta and Google.

Advertisers seek scalable, sustainable, and brand-safe solutions to effectively produce new designs at an incredibly high volume, as there are limited turnkey and cost-effective options available.

Here at The Washington Post, we, like so many others, were looking for solutions to this “creative challenge.”

This pushed our paid media team to investigate options. We wanted to leverage our award-winning journalism in alignment with our internal mission of sharing riveting storytelling for all of America.

Using a reader-centric approach, we began showcasing the differentiators of exclusive reporting and smart opinions from The Washington Post to diversify our creative strategy and amplify our reach amongst new readers.

Phase 1: slow and grow

In the beginning, we used a simple, manual, and labour-intensive process of boosting organic content.

Our initial KPI was to drive site traffic and ultimately increase exposure and readership of our journalists’ work. We also hoped to build new, high-quality audience pools for future retargeting opportunities in our lower-funnel conversion campaigns. We curated select journalism that was performing well organically and started experimenting with different investment levels across various content categories.

Immediately after launching, we saw a healthy decline in creative fatigue. A month later, we began seeing more promising (and some unexpected) results.

• Cost per click (CPCs) were 24% more efficient than our target.
• Overall traffic on article pages grew by 12%.
• Articles with paid support drove a 31% lift in conversion rates compared to organic alone.

As we saw traffic volume and cost efficiencies that exceeded expectations, we also saw an opportunity to expand our content strategy into lower-funnel, conversion campaigns.

By keeping our journalism at the forefront of this tactical expansion, we were able to continue reaching unique audiences and begin driving subscriptions from new readers who were being exposed to the diverse range of The Washington Posts’ reporting from our campaigns.

Phase 2: faster, stronger, better

As positive results continued, we wanted to build a sophisticated and interactive tool that would unlock scale more effectively than our current manual strategy. We sought the support from several of our teams to get this done.

After collaborating across our editorial, engineering, product, brand, and subscription marketing teams, we began automating processes that identified evergreen articles with a high likelihood of driving conversions. We also started automating processes that created and launched content ads within our platforms.

These automations created a constant rotation of timely and relevant articles at a much higher volume in our campaigns. Being able to promote a larger scale of stories meant we were able to diversify our creative messaging more effectively as well. It also eliminated a huge portion of manual work that would otherwise be required to manage these campaigns.

Phase 3: increasing volume and diversification of creative

With the success of the first two phases, we’re continuing to push the boundaries of scale and efficiency while exploring new areas of opportunity and experimentation. This expansion allows us to highlight the work of our journalists in new and interesting ways, while combatting our “creative challenge” by increasing the volume and diversification of our ads.

Specifically, we are:

• Expanding into more platforms and gathering insights on audiences’ respective content appetites.
• Building unique strategies and automation tools for newsroom vs. opinions articles to better support the specific needs and goals of each.
• Testing new formats. Though this is still in early stages, promoting video content from our journalists has already shown encouraging results. Despite our original strategy focus on awareness/reach, we’ve seen a healthy number of conversions and cost per acquisition (CPAs) within range of our benchmarks.

Why it works

Since launching our content campaigns, we’ve seen no indications of diminishing returns. We’ve proven that, when done right, article promotion is an efficient and powerful tool to reach new audiences and drive business goals.

Additionally, using our newsroom and opinions reporting has been an effective tactic in addressing the “creative challenge.” We’ve lowered our frequency and creative fatigue across key marketing platforms and quadrupled our paid ads in market each month.

By leveraging the breadth and depth of our published journalism, we’re now reaching more audiences in our paid media campaigns than ever before while improving efficiencies across the marketing funnel.

Through the brilliant collaboration of many teams at The Washington Post and our relentless pursuit to use technology to deliver important stories from our journalists to audiences across America, we’re marketing at the speed of news.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .