Back in the mists of time, over twenty years ago, Royalauto was the official magazine of the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria, a prestigious organisation that was highly respected by both its members and the general public.

Despite this, the advertising manager of Royalauto found it very hard to sell advertising space in his magazine.

Research showed that the magazine had good reach, attracting more readers than Wheels, Modern Motor, Motor Manual, People, Playboy, Penthouse, Time, Newsweek, Rydges, Australian Business or even the Business Review Weekly. The demographics were good too, with Royalauto reaching more A/B socioeconomic group readers than Family Circle, House and Garden, Home Beautiful, Better Homes, Vogue Living, Newsweek, Rydges, Australian Business or Business Review Weekly. 

Yet advertisers were just not buying space in the magazine.

The first clue came when the Royalauto Advertising Manager said that while advertisers he approached were enthusiastic about both the magazine and about placing their advertising in the magazine, they all worked through advertising agencies and he had never received an ad from an agency.

Further investigation revealed the advertising bottleneck.

Although advertisers were in the group that read, enjoyed and valued Royalauto, most agency media managers did not personally read Royalauto and saw it as some kind of garden mulch regularly home-delivered to rot in the yard.

So here were two decision-makers, with two perspectives on the worth of the product, both of whom needed to be persuaded to act.

What would you have done?

The Royalauto campaign you see here was the selected campaign. Royalauto ran the full page ad on the left in advertising industry magazines, backed up by six weekly postcard mailings to every advertising agency media manager and every potential advertiser. Each piece of advertising highlighted the research findings and invited the reader to take advantage of Royal Auto's hand-delivered guaranteed readership.

Suddenly potential advertisers were demanding answers from their agencies, while media managers were surprised by the research and didn't have good reasons why Royalauto should not be included in their media mix. The result was that Royalauto advertising sales skyrocketed.

While the advertising budget for this campaign was restricted to a print campaign and wasn't big even for print, the sales results for a two month campaign were very impressive.

Talk to us about writing the campaign that works.

Ideas Unlimited
idealist@bigpond.com

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PO Box 694, Ravenshoe, 4888

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