Oliver UK

Client: The Guardian
Product: The Guardian GDPR
Title: Leave or Remain - GDPR The Guardian Way
Media: Digital/Display/Social/Email/Press
Country: United Kingdom
Date Of Campaign: Jan-May 2018

Background: GDPR was a European-wide change in the law that required companies to gain the consent afresh from all existing customers for the use of their personal data and for marketing purposes. It was a very troublesome mandate for some. But, we saw GDPR as an opportunity to step change our brand and relationship strategy. To continue delivering world-class journalism that holds power to account we had to re-establish, and deepen, our relationship with readers based on transparency, mutual respect and choice.Plus, when virtually every brand was pushing out near-identical and dull comms to customers, we felt we owed our readers an engaging, memorable and even entertaining campaign...

Idea: By treating the campaign like a brand strategy, we created comms that were very different from the competition: Creative that'd give our (typically very opinionated) audience a clear, transparent - but still very on-brand choice, linked to supporting The Guardian and the issues that they cared about.We used humour and the language of our news stories to communicate our message. We gave our readers simple choices: Opt in, or miss out. Read journalism funded by clickbait, or by readers themselves. An inbox inundated with spam, or stay informed by our award-winning journalists. Important to our strategy was a distinct campaign creative idea for communication consistency, and cut through from our other comms. Copy lines mined a similar tonal seam and full bleed colour marked us out. A campaign identity button united our strategy on all comms with: "Join us. Stay with us. Support us".

Results: 1. Retain existing Opt-ins:We rely on our readers for most of our revenue, so we were tasked with ambitious re-permission targets to make sure audiences kept in touch.> We exceeded our marketing and editorial permissions targets by +110%.> We also successfully cross-sold readers onto additional preferences with 1/3 editorial subscribers also signing up to marketing communications.2. New Opt-ins:We took an integrated, multi-touch approach, tailoring messaging across the full range of Guardian channels including; newspaper, website, app, social, DM and email> Nearly ? of new opt-ins came from channels outside of email (i.e. not our existing consumer database), proving the effectiveness our integrated strategy had on reaching previously unknown readers.> 62% of our editorial lists grew compared with pre-campaign levels, including our ancillaries such as Guardian Holidays increasing by +73%3. Optimisation:We only had one opportunity to get GDPR right. Our UX lab ran extensive research pre-campaign to understand the relationship our readers wanted with us, allowing us to hone our messaging and creative routes.We were highly reactive to consumer feedback and results from testing too, allowing us to iterate as we went.> As part of the campaign we completely rebuilt our Preference Centre, which was continually tested to optimise the flow and update the content to reflect reader feedback. By the end of the campaign, we'd uplifted our preference centre opt-ins by +47%> This resulted in us seeing a sustained improvement in website opt-in rates of +23% compared with pre-campaign levels