On a Friday in August, 2014, six leading national newspaper groups joined forces to run a unique package across all of their platforms for a single day. The results were outstanding. 

“Day of influence” was conceived by Newsworks to demonstrate the impact of reaching an audience of more than 20 million people across news brands in one day.

PHD and Expedia pitched for and won the Day of Influence package for a campaign to promote tourism back to the Philippines following the devastation of typhoon Haiyan. The Day of Influence package gave them the opportunity to influence people’s beliefs and behaviour, while supporting the recovery of tourism as a valuable source of income.

The aim of the campaign was to raise awareness and understanding of the Philippines as a holiday destination and to encourage consumers to discover more at Expedia’s specially created site, TravelThatMatters.co.uk. 

The Expedia.co.uk campaign ran in the Guardian, i, The Independent, Evening Standard, The Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Sun, The Times, and The Daily Telegraph.  

The pre- and post-campaign tracking results show the impact of reaching a huge and engaged audience in one go, with 60% of readers recalling the campaign, 71% liking it, and 62% motivated to find out more. 

More than 30,000 people visited the “Travel That Matters” site, with online interaction rates 160% higher than DoubleClick benchmarks. 

The tablet interstitials, created by Adnostic, saw 275,326 page views overall and almost 10,000 taps through to the Travel That Matters blog. The CTR average was 3.6% (246% higher than the retail and travel benchmark established by Newsworks’ Tablet Project).  

The response to the print ads was exceptional. It was not a direct response campaign and readers needed to type in a brand new URL (not supported by search or found via the Expedia site), yet the print ads delivered a response rate that was 52% higher than direct response averages. 

The campaign — designed by Ogilvy to run across all major U.K. newsbrands in print, tablet, online, and mobile on August 29, 2014 — also resulted in a 55% year-on-year uplift in searches for the Philippines on Expedia.co.uk.

Commenting on the one-day campaign, Jill Lloyd, senior PR manager at Expedia.co.uk, said: “On 29 August, the only promotion we used were news brands, and in most cases users needed to remember and actively type in a brand new Web site address. So the impact of the campaign, both in terms of traffic to the site and the increase in searches on Expedia.co.uk, clearly shows the power of news brands to change attitudes and deliver results.” 

Emma Callaghan, press account director at Omnicom Media Group’s PHD, pitched the idea at Newsworks’ Shift 2014 conference in April. Out of the three Day of Influence finalists pitching to more than 200 delegates at the British Library, Emma’s idea was voted the winner. 

“We wanted to use the power of news brands to raise awareness and change perceptions,” she said. “PHD put together a media schedule that would ensure we were highly impactful across multiple platforms using rich media and large formats. News brands gave us the opportunity to tell the Philippines’ story.”

Newsworks’ chief executive Rufus Olins added: “We set out to get the nation talking. These results prove that we achieved it. It’s great to see news brands collaborating to offer such a unique package for a campaign that encompassed all platforms and demonstrated a real chance to make a difference.” 

The full case study is available here. 

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