Mail Newspapers is running a competition for media agencies, as the Daily Mail publisher looks to prove its print publications can drive sales online.
The publisher is offering a prize of £250,000 in free print advertising to the winning media agency.
To win, media agencies must partner with a client and describe in 250 words or less why their brand would benefit from using Mail Newspapers to drive traffic online.
To qualify for the competition, the entrant must have agreement from their client that Mail Newspapers can deploy a 1 question pop-up survey on their site at key times of the campaign.
Mail Newspapers is keen to boost the advertising on its print publications. The newspaper’s sister website, MailOnline, is currently the most visited newspaper site in the world, ahead of the New York Times.
The competiton has been launched to coincide with a study commissioned by the Mail looking into how print advertising in the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday drives readers directly to advertisers’ websites.
The study, carried out by independent marketing company River Research, examined the online browsing habits of Mail and non-Mail readers.
The Mail readers were given a copy of the Mail or Mail on Sunday to browse for 15 minutes before going online. The non-Mail readers were not. Both groups were then asked to log on to the internet and search for their desired products.
The results indicated thatMail readers were three times likely to visit a specific advertiser’s website (either by typing in the URL or searching for its brand name on a search engine) than non-Mail readers who tend to search for general products rather than named brands.
Half of the Mail readers visited the website of an advertiser they had just seen in their allocated paper – while just 15% of non-Mail readers visited the same advertisers.
Rosemary Gorman, ad director at Mail Group, said: “This research backs up what we’ve always thought about advertising in the Mail titles – that as well as being an excellent brand-builder print is also a great tactical tool. With one in two of our respondents in this survey going to the website of at least one of our advertisers from the same day’s newspaper, the link here between print exposure and on-line action is clear.
“This research also shows that Mail newspapers provide a very direct route to drive readers to our advertisers’ websites –tending to bypass some of the less direct routes such as search engines which can bring the consumer into contact with a whole host of competing advertisements for products in the sectors which they are researching.”
The competition can be entered here
