IN-DEPTH CASE STUDIES
HANNAH BOURNE, SENIOR MARKETING MANAGER HARPERCOLLINS CHILDREN’S BOOKS. & JAMES ERSKINE, DIRECTOR OR MEDIA, THE BIG SHOT
HarperCollins was a multi-faceted strategy to reach that target audience. We found some key infl uencers in the form of bloggers – some geeky ones and some cool ones – to talk to this very targeted audience. We worked with NME Radio, which was rich with an audience of teenage boys. We found older geeks with ‘SFX’ magazine and we found younger geeks with ‘Dr Who’ magazine.” “Primarily,” explains Hannah Bourne, Senior Marketing Manager at HarperCollins, “this campaign was about outreach. We were looking to get both books in the series into the hands of our target market, which we hoped would lead to advocacy and would drive traffi c to all of our owned media. It was really important to talk to those 13-year- old boys in a way that was very engaging. And ultimately of course, because we’re a business, we wanted sales.”
TELLING STORIES For the fi rst book in the ‘Department 19’ series, published in 2011, a ‘Blair Witch’-style video trailer which ran on YouTube had already been created. That provided the tone and much of the narrative drive for the subsequent ‘Rising’ campaign. NME Radio gave away copies of the new book and The Big Shot created a spoof news report to run on the station, which referenced the story in the original YouTube trailer. More traditional were the cross-platform print and digital advertorials which ran in ‘Dr Who’ and ‘SFX’ magazine. And, as Erskine points out, all of this content was designed to take users back to the Facebook page ‘Department19exists’ where the conversation could continue and where fans were encouraged to buy the book.
Having engaged the target media and
enabled those publications to speak to their own communities, the search was then on for the infl uencers who’d act as advocates for the novel. Online there were reviews, competitions and further giveaways on style blog For The Young
Dude.com and gaming community Blogomatic3000. The star of the show, however, proved to be a YouTuber named Jim Chapman whom The Big Shot found and asked to review the book, and whose enthusiastic pre-release video coverage racked up 154,000 views in July 2012 across fi ve video blog posts and reached more than 30,000 Twitter followers. Chapman is the cheerfully enthusiastic young blogger whose YouTube channel contains advice on everything from dressing like Harry Styles to talking to girls. As Erskine points out, YouTubers like Chapman are part of a new breed of social talent – prominent bloggers whose reach and infl uence often exceeds that of presenters and personalities working in more conventional
mediums such as TV and radio. “We sent Jim the whole series,” says
Erskine. “He spoke about the book when he received it. He spoke about how it helped him escape the real-life scariness of a trip to the dentist. He spoke about the book as he was half way through it on the train to London. He ran it as one of his July ‘favourites’ videos and he encouraged people to enter a competition to win copies of the book. Total views of Jim’s content about ‘Department 19’ are conservatively estimated at 154,000. HarperCollins then used Jim’s video and placed it at the heart of the ‘Department 19’ Facebook hub as well.”
TAKING ACCOUNT OF CONTENT “We were delighted with the campaign,” says Hannah Bourne at HarperCollins. “The paperback release of ‘The Rising’ outsold the fi rst book by more than 60 per cent over the same period of its launch. And the fi rst book saw a week-on-week sales uplift of over 200
52 issue 17 may 2013
per cent, which shows we were able to reach those teenage boys and that they were picking it up.” “With sales as the metric for success,” says Erskine, “it worked. Why? We think it was a combination of media, but digital was very much at the heart of that strategy. Those other media amplifi ed what was going on in digital and pointed towards the digital communities that were already in existence. Also, when looking at our target audience of teenage boys, we were thinking attitude, not demographics. Where possible, we didn’t want to look at advertising. We were on a modest budget so we wanted to integrate the content and the narrative themes of the book into the content of our targeted media partners, through both
editorial and advertorial. That leads to empowering the target media; we gave them license to get creative with the themes and to use multiple touch-points to deliver that content.” Since vampires never sleep, there’s
now a third book in the series, ‘Battle Lines’, published in March this year – and for this release The Big Shot and HarperCollins are looking at partnerships with Spotify and the viral seeding of a new short fi lm. The lesson from a campaign like this, says Erskine, is that while brands may own a whole range of social media channels, they also need to think about the broader role that content can play and, be prepared to build on it. “We put all this effort into creating a narrative and understanding the story we have to tell,” he says,”but once you have that story and you’ve developed those themes, you can really use them elsewhere in your marketing strategy.”
department19exists.com
thebigshot.co.uk
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