How Knight Dragon used newsbrands to drive awareness and differentiation of its new development on Greenwich Peninsula and generate sales leads.

1. Greenwich Peninsula launch campaign – Where riverside living starts
Executive summary
September 2014 saw the launch of an ambitious redevelopment of the Greenwich
Peninsula into a competitive and crowded London property market.
The challenge? Plan a media campaign that drives sales leads, raises the profile of
Greenwich Peninsula as a destination and creates a point of difference in a crowded
property marketplace.
The solution? Deliver an advertising schedule that is tactical, measurable and
impactful, with newsbrands forming the backbone of a campaign incorporating multiple
media and touchpoints.
The results? Greenwich Peninsula is on track to achieve sales targets for the first
phase, with the media campaign making a positive and measurable contribution to lead
generation for the scheme.
Background and objectives
Knight Dragon is creating a new and vibrant district on the Greenwich Peninsula,
situated one stop from Canary Wharf on the Jubilee line (Figure 1), which will see the
construction of 10,000 new homes, as well as the development of 48 acres of open
green spaces, a commercial district encompassing 3.5 million square feet of shops,
hotels, schools and public facilities.
In September this year, Knight Dragon undertook a media campaign to promote the
release of the first phase of 300 residential apartments for sale on the Peninsula,
launching exclusively in the UK.
The primary commercial objective for the marketing campaign was to deliver sales leads
for this phase ahead of the launch event held 20-21 September 2014.
The target was to sell all 300 units within two months of sales launch.
To achieve this, the media campaign needed to communicate with potential purchasers,
who were anticipated to be first-time buyers, professional singles and couples working in
Canary Wharf, as well as Greater London buyers who are currently renting or looking to
downsize.
Alongside this, the activity also formed part of a wider placemaking strategy seeking to
raise the profile of Greenwich Peninsula as a destination, and ran in conjunction with a
programme of summer events and pop-ups on the Peninsula.

2. For this campaign, newspapers in particular were a vital element of the media mix in
order to deliver the sales leads required - they provide dedicated property and business
editorial platforms, thus delivering both premium audiences and relevant environments
for Greenwich Peninsula.
Insight
Greenwich Peninsula faced a number of challenges at the time of launch that needed to
be addressed in the media plan.
The Peninsula itself is essentially an island, and experiences a lot of ‘transient’ footfall
from visitors to the O2 Dome. The challenge is to promote Greenwich Peninsula as the
destination in its own right, thus creating a foundation for a wider placemaking
campaign.
Creatively, the campaign sought to achieve this by creating connections with other areas
in London through the idea that the Greenwich Meridian (which runs through the
Peninsula) is ‘where it all starts’.
This led to the identification of two distinct target audiences for the launch –
‘placemakers’ and ‘purchasers’ – which were a key consideration when selecting media
placements.
The media mix needed to interact with both audiences to drive sales and footfall for the
launch event and also build Greenwich Peninsula as a destination and community,
which would in turn feed future sales (Figure 2).
TGI GB was used to profile the lifestyle attitudes of our anticipated ‘placemaker’
audience; educated, professional 25-40 year olds in London, who are culturally
conscious and socially active (Figure 3).
This data, and insight on the anticipated purchaser profile from the appointed selling
agents – CBRE and Savills – was then used to profile media consumption for the
Greenwich Peninsula target audience, including detailed newspaper coverage.
Outdoor, online and cinema media profiled extremely highly, which indicated that not
only should the media mix incorporate these platforms, but that our audience were
heavy consumers of highly visual media.
This informed creative strategy for our newspaper campaign – highly impactful, visually
striking formats had to be utilised in order to capture the attention of our discerning
audience, who want brands to ‘show me, don’t tell me’.

3. The plan
The launch campaign commenced with a three week lead-in time to the launch event on
20-21 September.
In a crowded marketplace, the campaign had to deliver bang-for-buck and stand out
from its competitors by doing something different, with measurable results.
Double page spread executions were deployed in newspapers (The Sunday Times,
The Times, Metro and Evening Standard), including a series of three centre-spread DPS
insertions in the Evening Standard, allowing truly full bleed imagery – the first ever to be
run in the title (Figure 4).
A lead-focused digital campaign was deployed via search PPC and display platforms, in
combination with rich media ‘shutter’ ads delivered via the Guardian’s data-led response
network offering.
This delivered a more detailed and engaging creative message (Figure 5 & 6), which
satisfied both our sales-focused and placemaking media objectives.
To target our key Canary Wharf professional audience and capitalise on the
‘connections’ creative theme, Greenwich ran the first ever takeover for a property client
of the platform screens on the Jubilee line platforms at Canary Wharf station (Figure 7).
This was run in conjunction with newspaper insertions in the business sections of City
AM and The Times and The Wharf, to deliver a truly impactful, multi-touchpoint
campaign.
Results
Overall, the first phase release is on course to sell out as targeted by 31 October.
Hugely positive results were achieved with newspaper advertising during the campaign,
with 54% coverage of our target audience achieved over the four week campaign; and
80% of call leads recorded for offline advertising being attributed directly to the activity.
Google Analytics data for the Greenwich Peninsula website also shows distinct peaks in
traffic and online registrations on days when print ads have run, which also provides
valuable insight into consumers’ journeys from print to web.
Offline advertising would also have fed organic and search PPC traffic, which has
delivered more than half of all website registrations to date.

4. Client view
Kerri Sibson, sales and marketing director at Knight Dragon Developments, said:
“The Greenwich Peninsula launch has been a huge success, bringing positive feedback
from stakeholders, our partner agents and purchasers alike.
It was important for the advertising campaign to position the Peninsula as a new
community for Londoners to call home, and at launch, it was great to see our media
strategy and selection so well reflected in the mix of potential purchasers – first time
buyers and young families, to older downsizers and investors.
The campaign was intelligently planned around our business requirements, and
combined the right mix of high impact and engaging creative formats and proven lead
generation platforms. We feel the return on investment in the form of enquiries and sales
leads has truly demonstrated the value of newsbrands, and newspapers in particular, for
projects of this kind”