The Guardian OTW IPA Award 2015_final_new_compressed

THE STORY
This paper isn’t just about papers. It’s about the biggest challenge facing most established
businesses existing in a digital world: transformation, and how marketing can help to achieve it.
In a world where 40% of today's companies will not exist in 10 years time1
, The Guardian was
facing the same grim reality as many other brands. If you're not a startup, you need to be a
'turnaround'2
. You need to transform.
Print journalism is perhaps the industry most significantly disrupted by the digital economy, not
only in the erosion of advertising revenue and print sales but also its impact on the quality of
independent journalism as the fourth estate. The temptation in this situation is to panic. To turn
your back on the old to face into the future.
But this story is about how strategy helped recognise the latent potential of the old to power the
new. Print media was not dead. Its legacy was not an obstruction, it was the bridge into the
future of The Guardian.
This paper will show that by focusing on print sales, and driving purchase of the most profitable
weekend papers, The Guardian was able to efficiently and effectively protect and harness its
oldest and most valuable asset, its journalism, in order to turnaround.
Using its comprehensive and high quality journalism as a branding iron to ‘own the weekend’
successfully generated a total incremental revenue of £4.8 million and delivered a revenue
ROMI of £1.83.
But this is a success story measured not just by the incremental revenue generated to invest in
innovation, but also by the ability of marketing to buy The Guardian something even more
valuable: time.
The ‘Own the Weekend’ campaign over its 4 year run, is likely to generate an additional
73 million copy sales, an equivalent of £61.9 million in revenue, or expressed in time, 1.2 years
in the print market. Valuable time to think about how best to innovate, time to test, iterate, and
crucially the time to transform itself into a participative business model. A model that will help
the legacy of open journalism turn around and take a transformative leap into the future.
1 Business Insider, June 2015, Cisco CEO delivers dire prediction, http://uk.businessinsider.com/chambers-40-of-companies-are-dying-
2
Nigel Morris, Forbes, July 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2015/07/17/if-youre-not-a-start-up-youre-a-
turnaround/#1b9d47847acd

TRANSFORM OR DIE
Over the last 16 years, UK national newspaper circulations have fallen 42.84% while quality print
sales have fallen c. 5% year on year.
Figure 1
3
This situation was becoming more and more acute with print circulation of national newspapers
falling by 9.0% in 2014 and Mintel estimating print circulation to decline a further 35.4% by
2019.4
Figure 2
5
3 Figure 1: The Media Briefing, Audit Board of Circulation – Figures from 2001 – 2014 abcquickview.newgrove.com
4 Mintel, National Newspapers UK, March 2015 – Trends in total UK annual circulation 2009 - 2019
5 Figure 2: Data2Decision, The Guardian, Data ending 29 Nov 2015
CONFIDENTIAL | SLIDE 1
UK NEWSPAPER CIRCULATION PREDICTIONS 2001 - 2019
-
500
1,000
1,500
2,000
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01-Jan-12
01-Jul-12
01-Jan-13
01-Jul-13
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Guardian Times Independent Telegraph
THE GUARDIAN REAL PRINT SALES (000s) VS. KEY COMPETITORS

Where previously digital businesses had struggled to fit into an analogue world, traditionally
analogue businesses, like The Guardian, were struggling to fit and evolve into a digital world.
A world which had become obsessed by the new and the free. New revenue streams, new
innovations, new technologies, new startups, and crucially new sources of news. From Google,
to Facebook to Buzzfeed and Vice, news was online, it was mobile, it was everywhere, and it
was free.
As Nigel Morris (CEO of Dentsu Aegis Network Americas & EMEA) wrote in Forbes:
“Startups are leveraging the digital economy’s dynamics and lack of legacy in the old model, and
threaten to take down some of the world’s strongest global companies. Near-perfect competition
is creating huge opportunities and disrupting almost every business sector – as well as society
and culture.”6
While all major papers, including The Guardian, rapidly shifted online, this disruption to their
business model was acute, with readers leaving in their droves to free news sources, leading to
huge declines in paper sales and then the inevitable decline in advertising revenue as their
readership decreased.
The digital economy both represented and threatened the future of The Guardian. Digital
advertising revenue wasn’t compensating for the loss in print revenues, and the monetisation of
mobile was even more challenging than desktop.7
The Guardian had to transform.
TRANSFORMATION FROM CONSUMPTION TO PARTICIPATION
The new model The Guardian set its sights on aimed to harness the dynamics of the digital
economy, an economy that is rooted in the connected infrastructure of its consumers.
AirBnB and Uber, the new powerhouse brands of the digital age were demonstrating how to
monetise the power of participation and collaboration.
It was time for The Guardian (the original pioneers in participation through its inclusive principle
of ‘open journalism’)8
, to shift to a model that monetised the participation in news and content,
rather than just the consumption of it.
6
Forbes, July 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2015/07/17/if-youre-not-a-start-up-youre-a-turnaround/#1b9d47847acd
7
due to lower CTRs and declining CPAs
8 Open journalism encourages the involvement of all views and opinions as part of the journalistic mission

For The Guardian, that transformation was going to manifest itself in three ways:
• Guardian Labs, allowing brands to connect with progressive audiences9
• The global expansion of The Guardian, with audiences connected around the world10
• A new membership program
In January 2014 Guardian Members was launched. It gives readers exclusive access to events,
talks and a look behind the scenes of The Guardian.
Figure 3
11
This transformation extracts value in a way that feels true to The Guardian; through a network of
connected people, participating with each other and the paper itself. Becoming a Guardian
Member allows readers to not only support Guardian journalism but to be part of it, creating a
truly digital, open journalism brand.12
But to achieve this, The Guardian needed money and time to invest in the new model. It was
time for marketing to step in.
9
http://guardianlabs.theguardian.com/
10 The Guardian is growing its readership globally, with approx. 20 million readers (rolling monthly averages March to May 2015 of those
reading the Guardian at least once every 6 months digitally or in print at least once a year) with two thirds outside the UK and 10m readers in
the US alone
11 Figure 3: Depending on the tier, members get different benefits - https://membership.theguardian.com/
12
This also enables The Guardian to sell higher quality, more targeted audiences to their advertisers, in turn driving greater digital advertising
revenue, a still crucial aspect of their revenue model
OVERVIEW OF GUARDIAN MEMBERS TIERS

VALUE IN LEGACY
Facing the stark challenges and choices of transformation, many were turning their backs on the
old. As Morris implies, the legacy of the old was an inhibiting shackle to be released from.
Publishers were fast cutting free, either closing titles completely, like the News of the World,
selling their entities to the new heroes of the digital economy13
or shutting their traditional print
operations and moving to an entirely digital offering, like The Independent.14
But what the new Guardian model recognised was the latent power of their heritage. If they
could tap into their history of open journalism to inspire a new connected model, what else in its
DNA could be extracted to create the blueprint for The Guardian’s future?
The role for marketing became clear. Drive transformation by refocusing on The Guardian’s
legacy, its most traditional source of revenue: paper sales.
Newspaper sales are disproportionately valuable. At the beginning of 2015 they still represented
64% of total Guardian revenues.15
And weekend papers amount to 59% of the newsstand
revenue.16
By selling papers and keeping the traditional model profitable for as long as possible, we could
help The Guardian safeguard its future, in perpetuity. To drive the most amount of revenue as
possible, it was also crucial to focus on selling their most valuable papers: the weekend papers.
In short the role of marketing was to harness the most profitable part of the business for as long
as possible and in the most efficient way to generate revenue to fund the business
transformation of The Guardian. To use the old to transform into the new.
13 Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon buys Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/washington-post-
closes-sale-to-amazon-founder-jeff-bezos/2013/10/01/fca3b16a-2acf-11e3-97a3-ff2758228523_story.html
14
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/the-independent-becomes-the-first-national-newspaper-to-embrace-a-global-digital-
only-future-a6869736.html
15 This includes all newspaper sales from newsstand, subscriptions and print ad revenue
16 The Guardian

A NEW MODEL FOR WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE: MONEY & TIME
This wasn’t just about funding the new, we also needed to buy The Guardian the time. Time was
crucial if it was going to work out how it could evolve amidst the commercial & cultural
pressures of the digital era, whilst protecting its journalistic integrity and principles of open
journalism on which it was founded.
After all, time is as important as money when you need to transform as a business. We built the
‘Own The Weekend’ (OTW) campaign, to drive success in three ways:
• Reduce circulation decline by selling papers
• Enable and support aggressive price increases
• Buying the time to devise new revenue streams
TRANSFORMATION THROUGH SACRIFICE & OVERCOMMITMENT
With transformation being the audacious goal, and money and time the success metrics, we
needed a strategy based on sacrifice and overcommitment.
A strategy that would sacrifice the temptation to focus on the new and the free, and instead
overcommit by ruthlessly focusing on The Guardian’s greatest assets.
We did this in four ways:
1. Overcommitting to the value of comprehensive quality journalism
2. Overcommitting to owning the whole weekend
3. Sacrificing the new in favour of the loyal
4. Sacrificing subtlety to sell hard

1. OVERCOMMITTING TO THE VALUE OF COMPREHENSIVE QUALITY JOURNALISM
The status quo for selling papers was about giving things away for free: promotions, and
focusing on January as a moment to prompt new consumer behaviour. The usual strategy was
to invest the marketing budget in promotional “gifts with purchase” – free CDs or books. Not
only had these “physical content gifts” lost their value over the last few years but they were also
expensive to produce and market.
These single copy sale activities were an expensive and inefficient way to promote, generating
negative ROMIs.
Figure 4
17
As well as selling papers by giving things away for free, the digital world had set an expectation
that all journalism itself should be free. Full stop.
We needed to do something different. Instead of selling papers by giving things away for free,
eroding value, we needed to focus on what consumers valued the most: The Guardian’s content
- its journalism. The Guardian’s legacy was once again its most valuable asset.
17 Figure 4: Data2Decisions, Econometric modelling
£0.52
£0.54
£0.58
£-
£0.10
£0.20
£0.30
£0.40
£0.50
£0.60
£0.70
Film Season, Sep 10
Music Loves Summer
S. Happier, Jan 12
HISTORICAL SHORT-TERM ROMI (£)
SINGLE COPY SALE ACTIVITIES

2. OVERCOMMITTING TO OWNING THE WHOLE WEEKEND
The Guardian Media Group has two weekend papers; The Guardian on Saturday and The
Observer, its weekly Sunday paper.
These papers contain some of the most well respected, high quality writing and journalism, and
also the most comprehensive coverage of every story, debate, exhibition, interest and trend –
across an abundance of sections and supplements.
What’s more, in combination, its coverage of the weekend was total. The Guardian was more
powerful as the sum of its parts. It didn’t just sell two weekend papers, it sold the highest
quality, most comprehensive journalistic reportage of the week, and enough content to fill your
entire weekend.
We were going to re-inject value in The Guardian’s content, by confidently selling the whole
weekend.
Because it ‘owned the weekend’
3. SACRIFICING THE NEW IN FAVOUR OF THE LOYAL
As well as recognising the power in brand ownership of the whole weekend, combining and
advertising both titles at the same time as a total weekend brand, also opened up a valuable
consumer opportunity.
There was a 40.3%18
crossover in readership of the titles. By advertising both we could be more
efficient in our advertising and increase the cross-sell opportunity between the two, driving more
value from our readership.
So rather than succumbing to the temptation to pull in new readers, we would overcommit to its
most established audience. Its existing readers.
In order to get them to buy more frequently and extend their repertoire (buying both weekend
papers rather than just one), the communications approach had to remind them of their beloved
ritual. Reinforcing and extending their habit by placing The Guardian and The Observer at the
heart of a good weekend.
18 The Guardian, AIR – Total Audience 2015

For these readers the weekend paper had become a ‘well loved ritual and tradition’.19
But this moment was under threat. Increasingly at the grindstone, working longer hours, and
spending ever increasing time connected to their devices20
our readers’ weekends were
frequently not their own.
That sacred moment to sit and read something tangible rather than transient, something tactile
rather than a tweet, was becoming increasingly rare, as their media consumption habits showed.
Figure 5
21
It was a habit that was also being impacted by seasonal shifts in behaviour. Our sales data had
shown that after long holidays, when the weekly routine changes, there were significant dips in
weekend paper sales, drop-offs in readership from which The Guardian and The Observer never
fully recovered.
Figure 6
22
19 Firefish Qualitative Research, June 2012
20
The biggest increase in online consumption has been among young adults, with time spent online almost tripling from 10 hours and 24
minutes each week in 2005 to 27 hours and 36 minutes in 2014 - Ofcom Media Use and Attitudes Report, August 2015,
http://media.ofcom.org.uk/news/2015/cmr-uk-2015/
21 ZenithOptimedia, June 2015, Global – report measures media consumed in its traditional form, e.g. newspapers in print
22 Figure 6: The Guardian, Annual Sales Index and Movement
-31
-23
-15
-11
-8
105%
CHANGE IN AVERAGE DAILY MEDIA CONSUMPTION
Internet
Television
Cinema
Radio
Magazines
Newspapers
2015 vs 2010
0.50
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AVERAGE ANNUAL INDEX & SALES PATTERN
EASTER
SUMMER
CHRISTMAS

Focusing on confidently protecting the routine and tactically re-enforcing the behaviour was
crucial.
‘Own The Weekend’ wasn’t just about The Guardian, it tapped into a consumer truth too. It was
a rallying cry to our readers to take ownership over what they were increasingly losing, to
reclaim what was theirs, as their lives transformed.
4. SACRIFICING SUBTLETY TO SELL HARD
When the time was right, we needed to sell hard. However The Guardian audience is,
unsurprisingly, comprised of readers who identify strongly with the newspaper’s editorial:
educated, liberal, and broadly anti-consumerist. Research showed they reacted very poorly to
unsubtle sales messages.
A different tone of voice to sell was called for, one that came from the voices of The Guardian’s
open journalism, from its many contributors, and the rich vein that ran throughout them - satire.
From Martin Rowson and David Mitchell to Will Self, Sid Lowe and Armando Ianoucci, The
Guardian champions satirical voices. Aggressive but considered, superficial but heartfelt;
satirists get to have their cake and eat it.
So why couldn’t we too? By applying the world of satire to that of hard sell, we could go over
the top, overclaim and over-scream enough that no one would know if we were kidding or not.
We called it ‘Hard Sell The Guardian Way’. Creating a language for communicating urgent sales
messages in a way that did not compromise the brand, and was actually a stronger sales tool
for it.

OWN THE WEEKEND – A TRANSFORMATIVE CAMPAIGN
January 2013 was the start of our ‘Own The Weekend’ campaign series. Since then there have
been different campaign flights, all with their own character but tied together by a playfully
intelligent tone, and the core idea: The Guardian’s and The Observer’s weekend coverage is so
comprehensive that they should have the right to ‘Own The Weekend’. Every bit of it.
The series was iterated and optimised over time to drive the greatest results. It’s why our last
campaign was the most successful, we were transforming and learning as we went.
Figure
23
23 Figure 7: The Guardian, Data2Decision, phd, BBH
OTW 1 OTW 2 OTW 3 OTW 4 OTW 5
KEY MESSAGE WE OWN THE WEEKEND
DON’T TRY TO OWN THE
WEEKEND
USE IN MODERATION WHAT A WEEKEND
OWN YOUR WEEKEND
OR SOMEONE ELSE
WILL
MONTH/YEAR JAN-13 SEP-13 JAN-14 SEP-14 APR-15
PRICE CHANGE YES (M-F, SAT) YES (OBS) YES (M-F, SAT) YES (OBS) YES (M-F, SAT)
PRODUCT
DEVELOPEMENT
YES YES YES NO NO
MULTIMEDIA YES YES YES YES YES
INCLUDES TV/
OOH
OOH OOH TV OOH TV
CREATIVE STYLE HUMOUROUS HUMOUROUS HUMOUROUS EMOTIONAL HUMOUROUS
MEDIA BUDGET £535,780 £477,271 £580,300 £513,228 £507,152
ROMI £1.37 £1.97 £1.85 £1.76 £2.25
4 | Confidential Source: Data2Decisions
OVERVIEW OF ‘OWN THE WEEKEND’ CAMPAIGNS

OTW 1: We Own The Weekend (January 2013) / Media Budget: £535,780
The initial campaign was kicked off by a film of truly epic absurdity – including the celebrity
endorsement of Hugh Grant, who drew a distinction between The Guardian’s integrity and
“obnoxious marketing” before introducing The Guardian & Observer’s official ownership claim
over the weekend.
OTW 2: Don't Try to Own The Weekend (Sept 2013) / Media Budget: £477,271
The next iteration of the campaign comprised two shorter films – optimised for YouTube,
demonstrating what happens when consumers tried to own the weekend without the help of The
Guardian & Observer.
OTW 3: Use in Moderation (Jan 2014) / Media Budget: £580,300
To support a 20p price rise, OTW 3 demonstrated the added value of brand and the additional
content of the new ‘Do Something’ supplement, by showing what happens when you overdose
on The Guardian’s comprehensive weekend content.24
24 Memorably we culminated with an image we would once have considered shockingly “un-Guardian”– a man in his underwear
committing an act of arson in the garden while repeating the mantra “The shed’s on fire”.

OTW 4: What a weekend (September 2014) / Media Budget: 513,228
‘What A Weekend’ was a 90-second film that brought to life the inspiring and incidental role that
The Guardian and Observer play in creating a weekend fully lived. The film charts a weekend
from the moment the paper arrives to the point at which it hits the floor on a Sunday evening.
OTW 5: Own Your Weekend Or Someone Else Will (April 2015) / Media Budget: £507,152
The latest iteration of the OTW campaign threatened readers with what would happen if they let
someone else dictate their free time. We created three humorous TVCs25
, each showing
someone having a miserable time because they let someone else make plans for them instead
of spending their weekend with their Guardian and Observer.
OVERCOMMITTING TO WEEKEND MEDIA
Our media strategy also reflected the creative ambition to ‘Own The Weekend’, focusing on the
weekend moment to reinforce and remind consumers to buy their weekend paper, at the most
opportune moment.
Naturally, this includes the weekend itself, but also key times when you are planning your
weekend, like Thursday after work and Friday lunchtime.
As well as reinforcing the behaviour at the right time, we were using the highest reach media, in
the moments when traditional media consumption was at its highest. Focusing on cinema and
TV as the most heavy weight channels throughout the campaign.
25
Howard watching his wife Sandra at a fun run in the rain, two men at a dinner party who met through their wives and Sally at a children’s
party

Cinema is a channel that over-indexes for The Guardian audience, a great opportunity to reach
them, not only during the times when they may be planning their weekend, but also in a highly
impactful, lean-in environment. The campaign ran in Picturehouse cinemas and visitors were
presented with samplers that celebrated Mark Kermode’s arrival as the new Observer film critic
with exclusive content on his favourite films – another way to put our journalism front and centre.
In TV we focused the investment around key weekend moments and TV shows. For OTW 5 we
accessed lots of politically-themed TV shows to tie-in with the UK General Elections.
In outdoor, we focused on running in commuter hours (rather than all day) to capture the
audience when weekend plans are more likely to be top of mind (and being more cost efficient).
Other media activities included VOD backed by online distribution and media support, targeted
escalator panels and a sampling campaign, including distribution of the new Cook supplement
in high traffic food markets, another typical weekend outing.
Each OTW flight was an opportunity to experiment, optimise and fine-tune our strategy. We
optimised the media mix by testing different approaches, which helped us to uncover an
optimum channel performance and make the campaign more efficient. With OTW 5, our most
effective campaign, TV was the most heavily invested in media, using VOD as support to reflect
the digital transformation in our consumers lives.
Figure 8
26
26 Figure 8: phd, Media Spend 2012 - 2015
0
100,000
200,000
300,000
400,000
500,000
600,000
700,000
OTW1
OTW2
OTW3
OTW4
OTW5
TV
OOH
Press
Radio
Cinema
Display
VOD
You Tube
Facebook
Twitter
OTW CAMPAIGN SPEND BY MEDIA CHANNEL

SELLING PAPERS AND BUYING TIME – THE RESULTS
The OTW campaign series delivered against the key objectives – selling papers, supporting price
increases and buying time:
• The campaign sold 1,722,060 papers in total
• Whilst they significantly increased prices:
o from £1.90 to £2.70 (The Saturday Guardian)
o and £2.00 to £2.90 (The Observer)
• It managed to reduce the circulation decline27
:
o The Saturday Guardian: from -11.2% YoY (Dec 2012) to -4.4% YoY (May 2015)
o The Observer: from -13.4% YoY (Dec 2012) to -3.6% YoY (May 2015)
• Delivered £2.5 million in short-term incremental revenue
• Drove long-term incremental revenue of £4.8 million
• Delivered on average, a ROMI of £1.83, with OTW5 being the most effective at £2.25
• It was profitable, with a Profit ROMI of £0.46
• Also delivered 165 million incremental page views to the website
• It’s projected to drive 73 million copy sales, or expressed in time, an additional 1.2 years
in the print market
The econometric model supporting these numbers isolated the effect of the OTW campaign
series and accounts for a number of factors that influence newspaper sales and digital page
views (market trends, absolute pricing, news agenda, seasonality, climate, in store coupons and
mass media campaigns)28
.
27 The Guardian, ABC report December 2012, May 2015
28 Data2Decisions, for further detail see technical appendix

Selling papers
The campaign delivered a short-term and long-term payback. The short-term incremental
revenue across all 5 campaigns was £2.5 million within the first 20 weeks of each campaign,
with a total of 881,108 papers sold.
Figure 9
29
The total long-term incremental revenue generated is £4.8 million, with 1,721,850 total copy
sales. The overall ROMI across all 5 campaigns is £1.83.30
Figure 10
31
29 Data2Decisions, App downloads no longer modelled since 2014
30 With the rate of decline in print sales stabilising, Data2Decisions has been able to measure a long-term multiplier of 1.95 across OTW
campaigns. As the long-term effect lasts up to 3 years after each campaign, the full effects of the campaign (OTW 3 to 5) are therefore still to
come to full fruition.
31 Figure 10: Data2Decisions, Econometric Models
117,446
450,552
452,343
668,607
771,524
0 100,000 200,000 300,000 400,000 500,000 600,000 700,000 800,000 900,000
App Downloads
Page Views
Obs
Sat
M-F
SHORT-TERM REVENUE (£) GENERATED BY OTW ACTIVITY SINCE 2013
Week1
Week4
Week7
Week10
Week13
Week16
Week19
Week22
Week25
Week28
Week31
Week34
Week37
Week40
Week43
Week46
Week49
Week52
Week55
Week58
Week61
Week64
Week67
Week70
Week73
Week76
Week79
Week82
Week85
Week88
Week91
Week94
Week97
Week100
Week103
Week106
Week109
Week112
Week115
Week118
Week121
Week124
Week127
Week130
Week133
Week136
Week139
Week142
Week145
Week148
Week151
Week154
Short Term Long Term
Average short term impact
from media Guardian
advertising campaigns
typically lasts for around 20
weeks after the end of activity
Long term effect lasts up
to c. 3 years post activity
(95% of the long term
effect has been realised
by week 150)
Guardian
ST:LT Ratio
=
1.95
LONG-TERM ROMI OF OTW CAMPAIGNS
Short-term
Long-term

Due to optimisation in creative and media mix (see above), we managed to make the campaign
more effective with time. We managed to transform the campaign in terms of creative
messaging and channel selection to increase the long-term ROMI by 64% (from £1.37 to £2.25)
from OTW 1 to 5. Our latest iteration, OTW5 proved to be the most successful OTW campaign
to date, achieving a long-term ROMI of £2.25.
Figure 11
32
Supporting aggressive price increases
A very important effect of the OTW campaign is one which is harder to attribute, but there is
evidence to suggest the campaign helped support several price rises: a crucial aspect to the
positive revenue results. Between January 2013 and April 2015 prices increased from £1.90 to
£2.70 (Saturday Guardian) and £2.00 to £2.90 (Observer).
Figure 12
33
32 Figure 11: Data2Decisions
33 Figure 12: Data2Decisions, The Guardian
0.70
1.01
0.95
0.90
1.16
0.67
0.96
0.90
0.85
1.10
0.00 0.50 1.00 1.50 2.00 2.50
OTW 1
OTW 2
OTW 3
OTW 4
OTW 5 £2.25
£1.76
£1.85
£1.97
£1.37
WEB OUTAGE
SHORT-TERM & LONG-TERM ROMI COMPARISON OF OTW CAMPAIGNS
WEIGHTED
COMPETITOR
PRICE
RELATIVE
PRICE TO
MARKET
WEEKDAY
£1.80 £1.20 £1.40 £1.60
£1.32 £0.48LAST CHANGE:
Apr 2015 +20p
LAST CHANGE:
Jan 2014 +20p
LAST CHANGE:
Feb 2014 +20p
LAST CHANGE:
Sep 2015 +20p
SATURDAY
£2.70 £1.50 £2.00 £2.00
Apr 2015 +20p
LAST CHANGE:
Sep 2008 +10p
LAST CHANGE:
Nov 2011 +10p
LAST CHANGE:
Sep 2015 +20p
SUNDAY
£2.90 £2.50 £2.00 £2.20
Sep 2014 +20p
LAST CHANGE:
Jul 2012 +30p
LAST CHANGE:
Feb 2011 +10p
LAST CHANGE:
Jul 2013 +20p
OVERVIEW OF LAST PRICE RISES

The Guardian continues to widen the price gap with the rest of the quality print market,
particularly on Saturday papers. And its able to demand higher prices due to brand loyalty and
product improvements34
.
By building more value into the brand and product rather than eroding it by giving things away
for free, the OTW campaigns were used to support several price increases. We were able to
keep price elasticity stable, not only driving incremental volume, but also value - thanks to
higher prices – leading to a disproportionate sales effect.
Figure 13
35
The overcommitment to quality journalism paid off. The OTW campaigns proved more effective,
even on a short-term ROMI basis, in comparison to previous, incentive-led campaigns.
Figure 14
36
34 Product improvements can include a design refresh, product refinement or the introduction of new supplements
36 Figure 14: Data2Decisions, Econometric modelling
0.40
0.60
0.80
1.00
1.20
1.40
1.60
01-Jan-12 01-Jul-12 01-Jan-13 01-Jul-13 01-Jan-14 01-Jul-14 01-Jan-15 01-Jul-15
Mon-Fri Sat Observer
COMPETITOR WEIGHTED INDEX
ABOVE MARKET PRICE
The Times moved 30p
above the Guardian
from £2.20 to £2.50
BELOW MARKET PRICE
GUARDIAN AND OBSERVER PRICE INCREASES IN COMPARISON TO MARKET AVERAGE
£0.52
£0.54
£0.58
£0.70
£0.95
£1.01
£0.95
£1.16
£-
£0.20
£0.40
£0.60
£0.80
£1.00
£1.20
£1.40
Film Season,
Sep 10
Music Loves
Summer
S. Happier, Jan
12
OTW 1, Jan 13
OTW 3, Jan 14
OTW 2, Sep 13
OTW 4, Sep 14
OTW 5, Apr 15
HISTORICAL VS. OTW SHORT-TERM ROMI (£)

Driving digital traffic
While not the main objective of the campaign, a welcome side effect was its impact on digital
traffic. While the news agenda is the strongest driver of page views, the OTW campaigns – while
selling papers – also drove traffic to the website, unlocking the potential for more digital
advertising revenues in the future.
Figure 15
37
While the campaign delivered a total of 1,722,060 paper sales, it also drove digital traffic
significantly. The short-term incremental page views delivered were 165 million between 2013
and 2015.
Figure 16
38
38 Figure 16: Data2Decisions, long-term copy sales figures based on multiplier of 1.95, no long-term effect on page views
0
20
40
60
80
100
120
140
Apr-12 Aug-12 Dec-12 Apr-13 Aug-13 Dec-13 Apr-14 Aug-14 Dec-14 Apr-15 Aug-15
PageViews(Millions)
Base Price News Agenda 3 Pigs OTW1 OTW2 OTW3 OTW4 World Cup OTW5 Elections KIITG Guardian Ads
With Mobile App
Data base increases
No previous mobile app data available
IMPACT ON WEEKLY PAGE VIEWS (ACROSS ALL DEVICES IN MILLIONS)
0
100000
200000
300000
400000
500000
600000
700000
800000
900000
Page Views (000s)
Obs
Sat
M-F
Short-term
Long-term
* Incremental page views only short-term eﬀect
417,341
396,474
813,815
473,686
242,916
230,770
222,851
211,708
434,559
165,000 *
156,750
TOTAL NUMBER OF PAPERS SOLD & PAGE VIEWS (OTW)

Buying time
The success of the campaign doesn’t stop at the incremental revenue that it generated to help
The Guardian invest in their future facing model.
Money is only one important part of the business transformation equation.
Equally important is the time needed to think, develop, implement and establish the new model.
Print sales are the bridge into the future for The Guardian. The longer we can make that bridge,
the easier it will be to cross over into a constantly evolving future.
Looking through all the numbers, what occurred to us in the context of business transformation,
was an interesting dimension of the campaigns effect, projected into the future.
When you look at the projected decline in the market, the OTW campaign, over the last 4 years
has helped The Guardian to generate a potential 73,298,16739
of future copy sales.
This equals £61.9 million in revenue or, expressed in time, translates to an additional 1.2 years
within the print market (or 1 year, 2 months and 2 weeks to be exact).
Using the uplift of the campaign and extending it into the future, the contribution of the OTW
campaigns has been to buy The Guardian more time to transform.
Figure 17
40
39 The Guardian, based on average annual newspaper sales of £60+ million as per FY15/16 sales levels
40 Figure 17: Data2Decisions, assuming decline continues at current rate
PRINT SALES DECLINE WITH AND WITHOUT OTW

The ‘Own The Weekend’ campaign series was a critical part of The Guardian’s business
transformation over the last 4 years, and due to its lasting brand effect, continues to be so
today.
Both the incremental revenue and extra time, is helping to drive The Guardian’s transformation
into a model that allows them to compete in a digital world.
Leveraging its legacy and using the old model to fund the new has been a successful strategy.
We sacrificed the desire to focus on the new and overcommitted to its most powerful assets:
its high value, high quality weekend content.
This generated the critical money and time needed to fund the future of The Guardian.
CONCLUSION – HOW ESTABLISHED BUSINESSES CAN USE MARKETING TO DRIVE
BUSINESS TRANFORMATION
The Guardian’s story is not unique. Many established businesses, both client side and in our
industry, face the same challenge of the digital economy. We exist in an innovation critical world.
Faced with this stark reality, we’d encourage others to transform in the way The Guardian did:
• Use marketing to leverage your legacy as a competitive advantage. Use the old to power
the new
• Recognise transformation requires sacrifice and overcommitment in order to not divert
investment and attention from the primary task of transformation
• Realise the value of both participation and consumption
• Don’t diminish marketing’s role to one of pure revenue generation; use it to buy you the
time to think and drive these innovations
• The key to unlocking the new model you are seeking might just lie in your brand’s legacy
The first signs of efficacy of The Guardian’s new model are positive. True, time will tell, but what
we have learned is that whatever happens, marketing is well placed to drive the next
transformation, whatever that may be.

TECHNICAL APPENDIX – PRODUCED BY DATA2DECISIONS – APRIL 2016
Overview
Data2Decisions have worked with The Guardian to build Econometric models to understand the
key drivers behind print sales and website visits over the last 5 years. The models are built at the
national level using an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimation technique. Due to the nature of
the market, there are three press models (Monday to Friday, Saturday and Sunday).
This appendix aims to provide detailed technical information on the econometric models built for
The Guardian brand. It is noted here that the models were not built specifically for this paper,
but as part of a modelling project for The Guardian.
Within the models we are accounting for a number of factors that influence newspaper sales and
digital page views:
• Market trends – i.e. switching between devices and products
• Absolute pricing and relative to broadsheet market
• News agenda – split by big events (elections, politics, economic, sports etc.)
• Seasonality – i.e. public holidays
• Climate
• In-store Coupons
• Mass Media campaigns
Once data are collected and validated, the Econometric models are built up, various different
transformations of the data are tested including, but not limited to:
• Leads / lags of variables
• Adstock / carryover impacts
• Diminishing Returns
The aim of the Econometric modelling is to build robust models which make both commercial
and statistical sense, therefore maximising R-Squared, minimising the standard error and
ensuring commercially sensible results.

Own The Weekend: Summary Calculation
Own The Weekeend - January 2013 to April 2015
Incremental Revenue measured (£000s) 4,800
Cost of the campaign (£000s) 2,614
Revenue ROMI 1.83
Estimated Profit Margin for The Guardian 25%
Profit (£000s) 1,200
Profit ROMI 0.46
Total Media Budget 2,613,390
TV 707,000 (27.1 %)
Cinema 653,795 (25%)
Display 487,910 (18.7%)
OOH 404,874 (15.5%)
VOD 310,608 (11.9%)
Facebook 31,223 (1.2%)
YouTube 17,980 (0.7%)

Methodology & Data
A total of three models were built, covering Monday-Friday print sales, Saturday print sales and
Sunday print sales.
The transformations made to the independent variables were to apply an adstock and
diminishing return transformation to all advertising variables. The adstock and diminishing return
coefficients were estimated simultaneously as the coefficients that minimised the mean square
error in the model.
Significant news stories, such as elections, sporting events, terrorist attacks and notable deaths
were combined into one variable, an example is plotted below.
Seasonality such as Christmas and other public holidays were also been combined into one
variable.
The data frequency in the model is weekly, covering the period 8 Apr 2012 to 29 Nov 2015,
giving 191 total observations.
The model coefficients were estimated using ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation.

Model specification and Outputs
Graph 1: Monday – Friday Print Sales model actual vs. fitted
Source: Data2Decisions
Graph 2: Monday – Friday Print Sales model residuals
Table 1: Monday – Friday Print Sales model explanatory variables, coefficients and t
stats
Dependent Variable: M-F Print Sales
Method: Least Squares
Sample: 08/04/2012 29/11/2015
Periods included: 191
Coefficient Std. Error t-Statistic
Constant 999.1559 8.7380 114.35
Price differential -0.7873 0.1426 -5.52
Digital trend -4.14E-07 2.97E-08 -13.93
Waitrose Voucher Sales M-F 0.0002 3.80E-05 6.05
Times Waitrose Index M-F -10.9715 0.9811 -11.18
Media Three Pigs 3,935.5800 343.0382 11.47
Guardian Media OTW 1 (Jan 13) 31.6649 9.8839 3.20
Guardian Media OTW 2 (Sep13) 21.2031 7.8237 2.71

Guardian Media OTW 4 (Sep 14) 6.7024 8.1039 0.82
Guardian Media OTW 5 (Mar 15) 31.1578 7.8579 3.97
Guardian Media OFM TV 52.4164 8.5125 6.16
News agenda 1.0000 0.0674 14.84
Weather & seasonality 1.0000 0.0302 33.13
R-squared 0.9836 Durbin-Watson stat 1.7672
Adjusted R-squared 0.9798 Mean dependent var 785.1466
S.E. of regression 8.6461 S.D. dependent var 61.9894
Sum squared resid 11960.85 Akaike info criterion 7.2891
Log likelihood -666.11 Schwarz criterion 7.8000
Campaign-level advertising effects were detected by using separate variables for each
campaign to gain an understanding of the impact of different creative treatment.
Table 2: Monday – Friday Print Sales model tests
Testing Test Statistic Probability Pass/Fail
Fit Adjusted R-
squared
R2
=0.9798
Normality Jarque Bera JB=5.79 0.06 Pass
Serial correlation Durbin Watson DW=1.77 LB=1.62,
UB=1.91
Pass
Serial correlation LM(1) F = 1.25 0.265 Pass
Heteroskedasticity ARCH(1) F = 0.16 0.688 Pass
Graph 3: Monday – Friday Print Sales histogram of model residuals

Table 3: Monday – Friday Print Sales model residual tests
Series : Residuals
Sample 08/04/2012-29/11/2015
Observations 196
Mean -1.14E-12
Median -1.14E-12
Maximum 26.7982
Minimum -18.5821
Std. Dev. 7.9342
Skewness 0.3347
Kurtosis 0.5283
Jarque-Bera 5.7875
Probability 0.0554
Histogram of residuals and Jarque-Bera test statistic reveals no evidence to suggest the
residuals violate the OLS requirement of normality.
Graph 4: Saturday Print Sales model actual vs. fitted
Graph 5: Saturday Print Sales residuals

Table 4: Saturday Print Sales model explanatory variables, coefficients and t stats
Dependent Variable: Sat Print Sales
Sample: 08/04/2012 29/11/2015
Constant 458.8240 4.1337 111.00
Promotion 7.03E-05 3.03E-05 2.32
Digital trend -2.39E-07 1.56E-08 -15.35
Waitrose Voucher Sales M-F 0.0003 0.0000 7.62
Media Three Pigs 1,009.5004 161.8062 6.24
News agenda 1.0000 0.0747 13.39
Adjusted R-squared 0.9658
Mean dependent
var 340.4764

Table 5: Saturday Print Sales model tests
Fit Adjusted R-
squared
R2
=0.9658
Serial correlation Durbin Watson DW=1.99 LB=1.61,
UB=1.92
Near Pass
Graph 6: Saturday Print Sales histogram of model residuals
Table 6: Saturday Print Sales model residual tests
Series : Residuals
Sample 08/04/2012-29/11/2015
Observations 196
Mean -8.02E-13
Median -2.47E-01
Maximum 12.09
Minimum -10.42
Std. Dev. 4.00
Skewness 0.22
Kurtosis 0.23
Jarque-Bera 2.02
Probability 0.365

Graph 7: Sunday Print Sales model actual vs. fitted
Graph 8: Sunday Print Sales residuals
Table 7: Sunday Print Sales model explanatory variables, coefficients and t stats
Dependent Variable: Sun Print Sales
Sample: 08/04/2012 29/11/2015
Constant 279.9189 6.1792 45.30
Digital trend -1.46E-07 1.72E-08 -8.49
Waitrose Voucher Sales M-F 3.59E-04 1.06E-04 3.39
OFM 9.1449 0.9194 9.95
OTM 1.3702 1.1672 1.17
OFM Recipies 10.1163 5.0724 1.99
Media Three Pigs 439.9181 63.9866 6.88
News agenda 1.0000 0.0898 11.14

Adjusted R-squared 0.9390
Mean dependent
var 214.09
Table 8: Sunday Print Sales model tests
Fit Adjusted R-
squared
R2
=0.9390
Serial correlation Durbin
Watson
DW=1.68 LB=1.60,
UB=1.93
Pass
Graph 9: Sunday Print Sales histogram of model residuals

Table 9: Sunday Print Sales model residual tests
Series : Residuals
Sample 08/04/2012-29/11/2015
Observations 196
Mean -1.09E-13
Median -7.77E-02
Maximum 14.01
Minimum -12.63
Std. Dev. 4.58
Skewness 0.24
Kurtosis 0.26
Jarque-Bera 2.37
Probability 0.306

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