Cape Breton Post’s marketing campaign focuses on loyal feel, local photos
Ideas Blog | 01 July 2015

In October and November of 2014, the Cape Breton Post ran the “We Were There” campaign in print, on our Website at cbpost.com, and on Twitter and Facebook.
The Cape Breton Post traces its origins to 1901 and has a hard copy daily readership of nearly 20,000 and weekly Web site visitors regularly topping 100,000 and occasionally approaching 150,000. Those are impressive figures considering the population of our primary coverage area is about a 100,000.
The “We Were There” campaign was designed to tap into the strong loyalty that our readers have for the Post and to remind them of the enormous connection the newspaper has had with Cape Breton Island through the decades.
The seven-part campaign was to be very visually driven. Initially, we hoped to find images from long ago as well as more modern photos. This idea failed to gain much traction, however. Without an archive system readily available, finding the older photos would be very time consuming. What’s more, as the photos would be in black and white, they would probably not have the impact of more modern colour photos.

As a result, we opted for the more recent past and focused on finding images for categories that we thought would resonate with our readers: spot news, entertainment, sports, memorable events, community events, and others.
There were many potential photos from which to choose, but finding images that would fit the ad format did prove to be a challenge.
We persevered, however, and in the end we believe that our ads had strong visual appeal. We also augmented the images with a bit of text about the photo. Together, the photo and text communicated a lasting reminder to readers that it is the Cape Breton Post that has best chronicled their lives, the events that mattered in the community, and the history of Cape Breton Island.
The campaign also featured regular postings to Twitter and Facebook to help capture the growing number of readers who seek information through social media.
