The SPIEGEL campaign is about emphasising the intellectual quality of SPIEGEL magazine and re-energise the claim “SPIEGEL readers know more”. Through the use of unusual photographs published in the SPIEGEL, the campaign conveys the idea that the SPIEGEL reader not only knows about the news item concerned, but also understands the story behind it. Read the SPIEGEL and the background to the picture is apparent, true to the claim “SPIEGEL readers know more”. But even those who are not yet SPIEGEL readers do not have to puzzle forever over what picture goes with what news item. The solution can be found at spiegel.de/mehrwissen, where the associated article can be downloaded as a PDF file.

The images grabbed a lot of attention in the press and engaged the public in a lively guessing game, reflected by increased customer enquiries and, in particular, by enormous traffic on the microsite. The click rates for the duration of the flight are significant in terms of the success of the campaign - click numbers are anything up to 53,000 per image. But that’s not all! Spiegel was able to generate a large number of new subscribers with the new image campaign.