The Heart Foundation and News Corp ‘Walk Away From a Killer’ in the next chapter of their partnership
The Heart Foundation and News Corp Australia have released the follow up to the award-winning Serial Killer campaign which landed in February to much critical acclaim and success.
Walk Away From a Killer is again created by News Corp Australia in partnership with Host/Havas and urges Australians to get up and walk their way to better health. The campaign will be targeted hyper-locally at regional populations where the risk of heart disease is particularly high.
Heart disease kills one Australian every 30 minutes, although the initial Serial Killer campaign has since seen the deaths related to heart disease drop from 51 per day to 48. The new five-week integrated print, digital and broadcast media and marketing campaign follows on where Serial Killer left off, encouraging Australians to take pre-emptive steps to help battle heart disease.
In the first campaign, the print creative teased the reveal of ‘Australia’s Worst Serial Killer’, which was heart disease. The new campaign sees a headline of ‘I walked away from a killer’, promising the whole story inside the title. The campaign kicked off this morning with wraps across News Corp Australia’s key metro mastheads – The Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun. It was matched with full-page advertisements in regional mastheads including the NT News and The Gympie Times.
There will be another wrap in The Courier-Mail on Thursday and a wrap on Body + Soul on Sunday, and sponsored columns in the title over the following weeks.
The campaign is supported by an editorial series across key metro and regional mastheads, highlighting how walking has enhanced individual lives in different ways.
The Heart Foundation’s chief marketing officer Chris Taylor said walking was a proven way to cut the risk of heart disease, including associated factors such as high blood pressure and being overweight.
“Startlingly, only about 50% of Aussie adults meet the minimum daily recommended physical activity,” said Taylor.
The campaign seeks to build awareness of Australia’s largest free walking program, Heart Foundation Walking, which has more than 1100 walking groups across Australia.
“Our new walking campaign will feature strong, engaging content aimed at building awareness of walking and galvanising Australians to take a stand for their health,” Taylor said.
“Heart Foundation Walking is a truly great initiative and as part of this campaign we will be sharing stories of people whose lives have been transformed by walking.”
The initial Serial Killer campaign proved to be incredibly successful, resulting in the life-saving Heart Health Checks being added to the Medicare scheme and more than 880,000 uses of The Heart Foundation’s Heart Age Calculator.
The Heart Foundation has taken a bold approach to its marketing in recent times. The Heartless Words campaign launched in May, with Host/Havas, told families their loved ones were ‘lying’ when they said they loved them. The campaign played on the idea that if people really loved their families, they would care for their heart health.
The campaign received backlash almost instantly and was swiftly pulled, but Taylor maintains that tough campaigns are needed to encourage consumers to think differently about topics they may have become apathetic to, particularly when their health is involved.
“We needed a big idea, and we were very willing to take a risk to bring that to life. In fact, we wanted to shock Australia into action,” Taylor said on stage at Mumbrella 360 in June.
Taylor did say The Heart Foundation never sought to hurt anyone with its campaign, and that he was very sorry for anyone who was upset by the work, but that the intention had been to ‘cut through’ and make the most of work for an organisation that has limited resources.
News Corp Australia’s chief operating officer, publishing, Damian Eales said the ability to target hyper-local advertising showed the key role local news played in local communities.
“Our partnership with the Heart Foundation will include targeting populations where a significant portion of the population is at risk from a disease that’s often preventable, demonstrating how important local media is at the community level.”
Half-page advertisements in News Corp Australia’s metropolitan and regional mastheads on November 4 and 18 will coincide with geotargeting on Instagram and Facebook, digital direct response and search engine marketing campaigns.
People will be encouraged to join a Heart Foundation Walking group and download the Heart Foundation’s walking app. The pace will accelerate from November 1 to December 10 with the “Put Your Foot Down” step challenge, in which app users will go in the draw to win prizes for every 100,000 steps walked.
Good to see that they’ve evolved the campaign on from the previous work and that the partnership with News/Heart Foundation continues.
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It will be exactly the same as the last campaign – i.e – a few placements in papers across the country.
Let’s be frank – NewsCorp ain’t innovative, they just run trashy papers.
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I spoke to a rep about these advocacy campaigns… Apparently you HAVE to invest a huge amount in print to get it. They are beating a dead dog with cash to see if it will revive it.
Absolutely behind the times.
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Stage 1: Establish problem with Serial Killer
Stage 2: Create action to help target audience solve problem
Stage 2 will work because of Stage 1.
That’s proper marketing.
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Spot on Media Planner.
Anyone who thought News actually cared about spreading the good word vs ROI on print are naïve as hell.
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Wow @one trick pony and @Media planner… that’s exactly the kind of uninformed and millennial-esque point of view that I would NOT want to have working on my account.
First of all, this campaign is more than ‘just a few placements in the paper’. It’s a strategically clever, insight-led and well executed campaign which is the result of a tight collaboration between media publisher, a client and their creative and media agencies. I’d struggle to identify any large scale, award winning campaigns where the media owner drove the idea and the execution and collaborated so holistically in recent times. This thing won four Effie’s and Mumbrella’s campaign of the year… I think they’re doing something right.
Secondly, of course you’d have to spend cash in the papers and their complementary digital offerings… as with ANY media, you need to spend your marketing dollars within the media that’s doing the heavy lifting. And as for the choice of using press, I think this was spot on given two things: firstly national press seemingly drives the daily news agenda. Not sure if you’ve noticed, but every morning both Sunrise and Today practically run through the press headlines to fuel their panel discussions and their news desks. Now that’s a whole lot of incremental earned value for nothing. And secondly, News Corp’s national press were able to seamlessly and natively integrate this campaign within their national news cycle; can we honestly say that TV would have been willing to do the same? And for what was a comparatively small investment compared to what Heart Foundation would have had to spend to get this kind of cut through on tv? I think not.
When you consider the strength of the strategy, use of media and the idea, I agree with Mumbrella that this is a pretty impressive campaign and it’s a shame we don’t see more clients investing cleverly in traditional media. Might be something to do with their media planners…
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@Wake Up
I’m going to assume that you are one of the dinosaurs that have been at News for 10+ years and believes everyone still cares about print?
“Hols my beer / four Effies, News will come back, you just wait and see…”
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