“Wall Street Journal” spends millions to reach young audiences

*For Sarah Scire

O Wall Street Journal shared on June 11, 2024 the 1st vision of its new multi-million dollar brand campaign, with the new slogan “It’s Your Business”.

At the start of the campaign, SVP of Brand Marketing Alex Dousie said the newspaper had 3 goals:

• increase brand recognition. “We are trying to increase awareness of The Wall Street Journal brand to a broader audience than we have had in the past”;
• subscriber growth. O Wall Street Journal has 4.2 million subscribers, including 3.7 million digital-only subscriptions, according to its most recent quarterly report;
• change of perception.

The ultimate goal, Dousie said, is “the most interesting”. The average age of a subscriber to Wall Street Journal is 59 years old. The home page features navigation organized by the titles CMO, CIO, and CFO. With a new color-block campaign featuring a heavier version of the newspaper’s iconic font, the news organization hopes to reach a younger audience who currently believe the newspaper is not for them.

“Our name, The Wall Street Journal, is one of our greatest strengths, but arguably also one of our greatest weaknesses,” this Dousie. “For this audience, they hear the name and think, ‘I’m not interested in Wall Street. So why should I read you?’”

“What we’re trying to do here is for this audience to understand that the kind of content we’re writing should not only be right for them — should be interesting for them — but it’s actually imperative for them to advance their professional and personal lives,” declared Dousie.

The newspaper conducted extensive reader research before partnering with Mother for the brand campaign. The editorial team believes that this untapped young audience has “almost the same attitudes and ambitions” than their career-focused core audience, but have not yet ascended to the level of C-suite or to the top of your profession.

Dousie described this group as “very motivated by their professions” and the brand campaign as an attempt to sell the Wall Street Journal as a tool to help them take the next step in their careers.

The brand campaign puts the newspaper’s journalism in the spotlight.

“We’re really talking about specific stories, which we haven’t done in a long time and definitely not in this way before.”this Dousie.

The newspaper’s latest branded platform, “Trust Your Decisions,” launched in 2021. Featured stories include boardroom mushroom jobs, an art world dispute, buying gold bars at Costco and dealing with children of celebrities in the office.

The new “It’s Your Business” campaign uses specific locations in New York, Dallas and Miami. Ads telling potential readers to “Make Charger Hacking Your Business” e “Make Electric Vehicle Policy Your Business” they were designed to appear in parking spaces.

An announcement about “sleep divorce” will be placed above a mattress store and another explaining inflation through the price of hot dogs will appear on shopping carts. hot dog. The ads will appear in places with lots of people commuting to and from work, including Penn Station, but also in neighborhoods where the younger audience the paper is targeting “lives and exists”, this Dousie.

This campaign marks the first time that the newspaper is “non-market” in the Bushwick and Lower East Side neighborhoods of New York City. “This is not a campaign spread across Times Square, for example, because that’s not where our target audience lives or interacts,” these.

I asked the newspaper if the paywall would be removed in highlighted articles. The answer was: it depends. Some of the ads include QR codes to direct readers to specific stories. All the highlighted work can be found in the “É Seu Negócio” collection here.

Spokesperson Kamilla Rahman clarified that “Depending on a user’s propensity to subscribe, there is a chance that a user clicking on a story will see the paywall and be prompted to subscribe. Other users, who are visiting the WSJ for the first time, will likely have the opportunity to access these articles for free.”

“This is done intentionally to connect the marketing funnel and engage these new audiences who were interested in the WSJ’s exclusive reporting”declared Rahman.

The newspaper has been through turmoil in recent months, including several rounds of restructuring and layoffs, despite reporting record profits. The newspaper declined to confirm exactly how many jobs were eliminated, but they include roles in the U.S. news desk, the Washington, D.C. bureau and in audio. A new podcast, “WSJ’s Take on the Week,” which debuted in late 2023, has been canceled and its host has left the news organization.

Some questioned the protracted nature of the cuts and editor-in-chief Emma Tucker’s vision for the news organization. Tucker, who will become the first woman to lead the 135-year-old publication in 2023, has been consistent at least in what she says needs to change at the paper. She focuses – occasionally to the irritation of the newsroom – on audience data and has pushed for the newspaper’s work to be less rigid, more accessible and more engaging for a wider audience.

The branded campaign — which features gold bars, mushrooms and hot dogs — seems to fit Tucker’s mandate for more upbeat coverage. Dousie described the ads released on Tuesday as “very much the 1st phase” of what the newspaper hopes to implement.

“This campaign will not be temporary. This is an identity and a campaign line that should exist for many years”, this Dousie. “I always compare election season to our Super Bowl moment — and this [eleição] is obviously a big one. How ‘It’s Your Business’ translates into an electoral context will be very important to us.”

Sarah Scire is a deputy editor at Nieman Lab. Previously, she worked at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and The New York Times.

Text translated by Bárbara Pinheiro. Read the original in English.

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