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Premium B2C lighting Case study

Press advertising to boost direct sales

Serious Readers are a British company and a market leader in high performance, daylight quality lights. Perfect for reading by, they’re also used by forensic scientists, watchmakers and surgeons to help them see with greater clarity.

Previously, inserts had proved highly successful for them in terms of recruitment but the client struggled to replicate this success in press with campaigns created in-house. They turned to AJ with our wealth of direct response press experience and briefed us to deliver against key performance metrics.

Objectives

Produce response-driven press creative to engage with a target audience of AB adults 50yrs+

Address seasonality in light purchasing, in order to have profitable campaigns year-round

Implement a robust test that hits return on investment targets

Recommend an attribution solution that delivers clarity on press advertising performance

Report weekly on press results to ensure press deliverables are met

Strategy

We initially reviewed off the page advertising and insert results from the previous year to gain a valuable insight into the best performing titles. We used this and working experience to produce a press advertising test schedule. We strategically chose minimum-risk titles and recommended multiple formats to assess the relative benefits of each. We bought the media predominantly at “late space” rates to deliver the most cost-effective response.

Serious Readers provided coded weekly results that allowed us to evaluate press advertising performance. It was immediately obvious from the positive results we received that we could extend the title selection further and carry out more testing.

Weekly results analysis continued and we optimised the schedule on a weekly basis. This allowed us to grow the list of titles and run a series of different creative executions, always ensuring we had the best-performing piece of copy in the right titles. In all, the agency developed over 15 pieces of profitable creative.

Results

6 years later and we are still delivering profitable press advertising campaigns. Serious Readers press spend has grown from the initial spend of £20k for a test plan to a £600k a year campaign.

Another record-breaking week of sales for us last week – beating the record from the previous week – followed by a very strong weekend and today. Adverts not the only contributor of course but a significant factor. Thanks to all at AJ for doing a fantastic job!

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