BMW sponsors entire editions of AFR and Oz
The Australian Financial Review has pulled off what may be a local media first – a complete advertising takeover of an edition by BMW.
The weekend edition of the Fairfax Media newspaper featured a strip on the front and back page strip saying simply “The Ultimate AFR / The Ultimate BMW”. The only other ad that featured in the entire newspaper was a centre DPS to promote the BMW 7 Series. It told readers:
“Imagine if everything you encountered in life was the Ultimate, the quintessential example of its kind, just like this edition of the Australian Financial Review. It is the Ultimate because it is everything a newspaper should be but never is. It is free of the clutter of advertising and focused on what really matters, the news. No one has ever achieved that before.”
The BMW logo also appears on all but 14 of the edition’s 64 pages.
The media agency for BMW is Mitchells, which also won the media business for Fairfax earlier this year.
The execution may be an Australian media first, but has been done by car brands in other parts of the world.
In the UK, a 2003 edition of The Spectator saw every ad slot taken over by Mercedes in a deal overseen by media agency BJK&E. Mercedes also took over a complete edition of one of Sunday newspaper The Observer’s magazines.
And every ad in an edition of Private Eye magazine was taken over by Skoda in a 2004 execution overseen by Mediacom.
Update: BMW has also done the same with Monday’s Australian. According to the paper’s media section, BRW magazine will also get the same treatment. And Mitchells’ Melbourne GM Tony Mckay tells the paper: “There’s ahigh index to the number of marketing and advertising people who are BMW drivers, so buying Monday’s Australian was a good fit.”
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large. He returned to Mumbrella as Publisher in January 2025
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perhaps innovation would be BMW AFR sponsoring M5-less Gary Hardwick
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Didn’t Onetel achieve the same with the Oz early 2002?
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I also noticed the Aus advertising included a logo next to the masthead – reminded me a lot of an online sponsorship.
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Media first and newspapers in the year 2009? Come on Fairfax.
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The Weekend Australian also featured the belly band and a call to ‘ look for Monday’s The Australian’. The interesting thing is the Weekend Oz was home delivered (with our address on it) but we don’t subscribe and no-one does home delivery where I live anyway (stixville obviously!).
Nice piece of lead gen nurturing – other half had been enquiring about BMWs last month and provided address.
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Ballsy. Really impressed by Mitchell’s efforts here to pull this off.
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Hey Beau. Are u the big guy in disguise?
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Great piece of work and very brave. Aren’t I right in thinking all the other examples you quote ran all the ad space though? Either way as a consumer I’m loving less ads in the paper!
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i love the word ‘brave’ … personally I think it suits Anzac veterans more than it does tactical media buying but maybe that’s just me
It’s a stunt, surely.
Would love to see them try on one of the days the Fin carries heavy amounts of specialist ads (eg Thursday).
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Been done….Toytota 1,OOO year ago in Time mag…might have been The Bulletin…regardless…
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