Winner 2022

Media & Entertainment

Brand

Reuters

Entered by:

Reuters

Credits:

VMLY&R

The Source

The Challenge

With people being bombarded by news from every angle and from a wide variety of sources, it’s no wonder there has been a decline in trust in news from both businesses and consumers. In fact, according to Reuters 2021 Digital News Report, only 44% of people globally say they trust news most of the time.

As such, factual and unbiased information has never been more important as businesses and media owners look to accurately report and make business decisions that impact every facet of consumers lives.

In this tumultuous landscape, Reuters was looking for growth through both new segments and adjacent markets. The brand needed to be extended and refreshed to drive broader resonance and position Reuters as the go-to destination for accurate and up-to-date information. This was critical for Reuters to drive synergies in its marketing efforts and build a long-term competitive advantage across the diverse audiences it serves.

The Content Solution

As one of the largest news agencies in the world reaching billions of people per day, Reuters works tirelessly to build relationships worldwide to create, verify and distribute critical news to markets in real time. Reuters customers, including broadcasters, publishers, corporations and more, work with Reuters to ensure itsbusinesses stay agile and relevant, and that its audiences can make informed decisions.

In the face of declining trust in news, a blurring media set and the commoditization of news content, we had to find a new way to articulate the increasing relevance of Reuters core offer to this audience.

With 170 years of experience, an unmatched network of on-the-ground journalists and commitment to a strict code of ethics called The Trust Principles, Reuters has strong credentials of delivering accurate news as it is and when it happens. We chose to lean into this heritage to reinforce the strength and trust within the brand.

Our idea: Reuters, The Source. We positioned Reuters as the ultimate source of trusted news and information. We designed a campaign that would create maximum impact with both Film and OOH executions to showcase Reuters core offering of real-time, accurate, agenda-free news – just the story in its purest form.

Our Film was authenticity, distilled. It was made up of 72 news stories, sourced from Reuters own photojournalism and voiced by 11 Reuters journalists around the world, including Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Wa Lone. Arrested while investigating a massacre in Myanmar and sentenced to 7 years in prison, Wa Lone was eventually released after more than 500 days served. His voice, amongst others, remind us why Reuters truly is “The Source.”

We expanded this even further, using journalism’s most powerful tool, quotation marks, to frame the subject of Reuters photojournalism. Not only are quotation marks a powerful branding device, but also a visual shorthand for “The Source,” allowing the story to speak for itself.

The Media/Content Amplification Solution

Our amplification strategy started at the source: Reuters itself. With 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists across the world, and an audience of 42m across all Reuters platforms, we’re lucky enough to have a large captive audience. We built the campaign from the inside out by first distributing our brand film on our social channels, Reuters.com and through corporate communications. The goal was to galvanise internal audiences and reinforce the reasons why existing Reuters users choose us. But we needed to connect to new segments to grow. And that’s where our paid media strategy came in.

With a limited budget, our campaign had to seriously punch above its weight. A highly effective and precise media solution was therefore critical. We had to prioritise a strategy and media partners that could deliver brand reach and cut-through, whilst also allowing us to target and measure the business KPI: registrations.

“The Source” launched in September 2021 at a tent-pole moment for the brand, as Reuters marked its 170th year in business. Using unmissable fame-driving OOH locations across London and New York, including Canary Wharf and Times Square, “The Source” dominated the epicentre of the Finance world, ensuring we delivered brand stature against a tightly defined audience of the Business Elite. Our campaign delivered 8m impacts, at 4OTS across a 2-week period.

To deliver efficient reach, we then went beyond OOH and deployed online video over a 3-month period to build brand response. We worked with a highly curated selection of key digital partners to syndicate the brand video across multiple touchpoints. Partners were selected based on their audience affinity and historic performance across Reuters campaigns – including Yahoo, Teads, LinkedIn and MiQ.

To ensure efficiency, we established a test to determine the impact of audiences exposed to our brand film vs. non-exposed, using our key KPI, registrations. Our hypothesis was that those exposed to the brand video would be more likely to click on a retargeting ad and register on Reuters.com vs. those who weren’t exposed. And our prediction was correct. Exposed users retargeted via conquest targeting had the best CPA, 50% lower than benchmark.

For the sustain phase of the test, we worked with Yahoo specifically given they had strongest premium audience affinity and had delivered the best performance at launch. We were also able to implement their pixel on site to further enhance our retargeting approach.

The Result

As Reuters first-ever global brand campaign, “The Source” helped shine a light on the unique and robust business proposition Reuters has to offer, leading to over 100,000 professionals regularly engaging with Reuters.com.

The campaign received enormous PR pick up, delivering over 38m unique views. Sources included key business titles such as Yahoo!, Business Insider, Bloomberg and Marketwatch, amongst others. The film gained over 2 million organic video views, an 85% uplift in view through rates, +54% above benchmarks and +12% ad recall.

In our controlled test, we have also seen a huge impact in response rates (an impressive 20% increase in conversion and a 20% decrease in cost per acquisition) for those exposed to the brand work versus those who have not seen the brand work.

The static executions also saw 1.5 million impressions across Reuters social channels, with social engagement +15% on Twitter and +41% on Facebook against industry benchmarks.

“The Source” didn’t just connect with external audiences, internal audiences were united by the campaign too.

*”Looks amazing and we’re definitely proud of the brand that we stand for. Now we have an amazing tool to brag.”

“I think this is an excellent move in our branding, to push our gold standard of news reporting to the forefront.”*

In summary, “The Source” was a highly effective campaign. But it was also so much more. “The Source” is a big, long-term platform for Reuters. A platform that has galvanised internal stakeholders, a platform that readies the brand for the future, and a platform that has the potential to inspire many more campaigns that embody Reuters enduring, and never-more-relevant commitment to agenda-free, unbiased news reporting. This is just the beginning…