In a period where people are less willing to pay for information, newspapers have to find ways to convince people to read them. Very often this happens through promotions. As De Standaard is a quality newspaper it can do promotions, but at the same time has to preserve its image of a high standard source of information. How can you raise the number of readers, without selling yourself?

Make a campaign that creates relevance in the heads of people who know De Standaard but don’t buy it anymore. Create an impactful story that builds on our 100 years of experience, convincing non-buyers that a quality newspaper still is indispensable to form a good opinion based on the right information.

We dug through the archives of a 100 years De Standaard in search of articles in which they were, looking back at it, ‘wrong’. Then we rewrote the titles of those articles, so they matched the new insights De Standaard has today. Showing that De Standaard isn’t afraid to admit when they were wrong and change their opinion when new facts come up. We were proudly exposing our own mistakes from the past, and wanted as many people as possible to know it. To do so, we used De Standaard’s owned media like newspaper print ads, and native advertising on their website. But we also added highly effective mass media like television, cinema, radio and (D)OOH. On top of that, De Standaard added a direct mail and even created an editorial weekend edition that revolved around “Rewriting your wrongs”, making the idea break through the boundaries of classic advertising.

The campaign aimed at different audiences: students, people who just started working and are no longer willing to invest in a newspaper, readers that get their information from free articles on social media. Older people who don’t get enough information from their actual media sources.

In 2017, De Standaard launched a campaign, re-establishing the newspaper as the most reliable source for truthful news. Since 2018 marked the 100th birthday of De Standaard, we wanted to take this brand positioning a step further. We started by accepting that “the truth” is an abstract concept, influenced by times and emerging facts. And that it all starts by questioning your own truths from the past, and letting them evolve when time proves you wrong. Instead of hiding our “mistakes” from the past, we showed people that we had gathered new insights about those topics. That’s what we call “Rewriting your wrongs”.

The campaign consisted of all different media, a commercial in art house cinemas, ads in specific media towards our different audiences, online targeted posts and bannering, OOH on specific locations like train stations, around theaters and universities.

Timeline : After an awareness campaign in all media, we retargeted our audience online.

The campaign targeted the Dutch speaking part of Belgium, reaching over 90% of our target audience.

The campaign led to +2000 subscriptions, which is impressive for a small regional market like Flanders. By the end of 2018 De Standaard grew by 3%, being the only newspaper in the country to grow in a declining market.