Every advertiser has their own secret sauce for marketing success. Tested and refined over the course of their career or sought out to respond to a shift in the business approach, the strategy varies from one advertiser to the next. But the CMOs of IAG, Dell, Yalumba, Mondelēz and Vanguard Investments share a common ingredient in the media mix: news.

For Zara Curtis, IAG Chief Marketing Officer, it starts with her own media consumption habits. “Read the news,” she says. “If you don't understand what's going on in culture, how can you possibly understand what to do with your brand?”

Through tapping into culture and current affairs, Curtis believes marketers can better engage their audiences.

"You need context. You can really start preaching to yourself and live in an echo chamber in marketing, like all other industries. So understanding the zeitgeist, where people are actually at, and then listening to your customers, that's the power of good marketing,” she adds.

The natural extension of this is placing brands within the context of the news. For a brand like Yalumba, this context extends well beyond breaking news to utilise lifestyle content including travel, food and culture. This breadth of content across the news offering provides the brand with the opportunity to target consumers with different interests.

Hill-Smith Family Estates (Yalumba) Executive Director – Marketing and Communication, Nicky Gameau, says: “People that are reading the news, they're not just reading what's happened today or yesterday. They're also reading about lifestyle, culture, where to dine out. That's great for us because that puts wine into their cultural context.”

Leveraging context

For Yalumba, this context has been utilised to great effect with curated content inserted into printed news publications. During the onset of Covid, this content filled the travel gap for consumers highlighting cuisines from around the world and their ideal wine pairings for at-home dining. More recently, the brand has focused on showcasing different restaurants around Australia.

Working alongside this are digital executions within the news environment that enable the brand to reach its target audiences anytime, anywhere. Gameau says: “We need to make sure that we are both online and also in print so that we can reinforce our message and tell our story.”

This cross-platform approach speaks to the wider proposition of Total News which encompasses news in all of its forms. It’s part of the reason why Louise Eyres, Vanguard Investments Australia Chief Marketing Officer, has news as a prominent part of her marketing mix. She says: "Total news absolutely gives us that breadth, both from a reach perspective, but also the frequency.”

While Vanguard Investments has been in Australia for 26 years, for many of those years, the brand has largely been known in a B2B context providing investment solutions to financial advisers and institutional clients. An expanded strategy to connect with investors and the financial advisers who serve them called for a media strategy that speaks to a wider audience. News is the perfect fit.

“As a relatively new entrant in direct-to-investor at scale, and now direct-to-member with Vanguard Super, our clients’ needs are constantly evolving and changing. And that's where news really becomes that key platform for Vanguard to be present as we grow,” she says.

Vanguard has partnered with Australia’s major news publishers utilising print, digital and podcast assets. “It has exceeded the return on investment that we were expecting, both in terms of the reach, the engagement and the frequency of touchpoints. We have built a content story of trust, integrity and credibility that we would not have been able to achieve if we hadn't had that partnership. We can certainly see the results in terms of building our awareness.”

Trust and brand safety

Research consistently shows news offers a unique environment for advertisers that leverages the trust built by the media brands over time. It’s this trust that sees Sandipan Ghosh, Dell Technologies Country Marketing Head, come back to news time and time again.

“We need to ensure the quality of the content that we put out, and the brands we associate with do have a high degree of authenticity, credibility and trust quotient in the market. What we are putting out is well-vetted. It's not fake. So we don't want to create an atmosphere that our credibility is in question,” he says.

Brand safety is vital when aligning Dell with media and Ghosh outlines his approach as, “We have a legacy of our brand for last 30 years. There are media outlets that have a similar legacy, so we work with them. We understand the brand perception of that media outlet as well. And, on the basis of that, we decide whether to associate ourselves with a particular media outlet.”

Working the whole funnel

Another reason why CMOs like Ghosh and Eyres choose to partner with news is the channel’s ability to work across the entire marketing funnel. While IAG’s Curtis relies on news to build brand as well as run activation-style creative, other CMOs pick and choose which part of the funnel news can assist with on a campaign-by-campaign basis.

Case in point is the Mondelēz brand-building partnership to celebrate 100 years of Cadbury chocolate making at the Claremont factory in Tasmania. The news environment allowed the brand to tease out a range of angles around the 100-year anniversary.

VP of Marketing ANZ Paul Chatfield said: “We will always be guided by our objectives. Where there's an important aspect that news can play with, we will absolutely do that.”  

When it comes to developing a secret marketing sauce, IAG’s Curtis sums it up nicely when she says, “Understanding your brand, making sure that you really know your customer. And then being in the right places at the right time with the right message.”

And, of course, ensuring news is in the mix.

To find out more about how news brands could be the secret sauce in your next campaign, visit thinknewsbrands.com.au