Building empathy through the joint forces of radio and print
In this week’s egtabite, we showcase the complementarity of radio and press in a creative campaign for an unusual client.
DELA as a brand faced a major challenge: to communicate positively on the delicate subject of death, as well as to position itself as a funeral specialist. For the first time, RMB (the sales house of the Belgian public broadcaster RTBF) joined forces with the print publisher Roularta to meet this objective. The result was an original cross-media campaign combining radio and print.
The objective of the campaign
Although DELA has made clear progress in recent years towards a more human and warmer brand experience, the advertiser wanted to distance itself further from an overly formal tone and develop its overall communication, which was still often quite conservative and rational in its form.
The objective for this next campaign was to develop the “empathy” element of the brand through both content and format. The idea was based on a new messaging centred on the creation and sharing of memories. The focus had to be on the continuity of life: the importance of connecting together now in order to create beautiful memories for later.
The concept and the strategy
The concept of the latest DELA campaign was born within RMB’s creative team, FLASH, in collaboration with the sales team. On RMB’s side, the media choice fell on VivaCité radio because of its perfect match with the DELA target audience (people aged 35-64 as well as families with children of all ages).
At Roularta, the magazine Femmes d’Aujourd’hui (Women of Today) – the most widely read women’s weekly magazine in French-speaking Belgium – was selected both for the profile of its readership and for its capacity to reinforce the storytelling started on radio.
The concept of the campaign was developed around the theme of cooking – a common theme for the VivaCité programme schedule and the editorial content of the magazine. The originality of the case consisted in exploiting this theme by emphasising family recipes: cooking creates links between generations and creates unforgettable memories. This is the idea that made it possible to deliver the positive message that the advertiser strived for.
The perfect combination between the two communication channels, VivaCité and Women of Today, was another strong point of this campaign. The storytelling by DELA began with a radio contest and ended with a mini-magazine inserted in Women of Today, all in a very fluid and natural way.
Two phases of the campaign
Phase 1: Radio and Digital: call for recipes and family stories (September 2022)
The month-long DELA radio competition was featured in the popular Saturday morning programme, En Cuisine (In the Kitchen). Listeners were invited to share their recipes along with a family story that is dear to them – recipes and stories were shared on the VivaCité website. The winners received €350 for a family meal and were quoted on air. Each week, one of them was then called up to tell their story. In total the competition generated 19 minutes of brand integration over the course of four weeks.
The competition was promoted via a dedicated page on the VivaCité website, on the Facebook account of the show, in the VivaCité digital newsletter and using a display campaign on various cooking sites. The campaign also ran on radio and online audio channel Viva+. DELA was the featured sponsor of the In the Kitchen show (trailers and billboards).
Phase 2: Magazine: collection of recipes “Let’s celebrate life” (November 2022)
A special jury looked at all the winners of the VivaCité competition and selected six of the family recipes with the most touching stories. These six recipes were then published as a mini-magazine by DELA that was inserted in the first November issue of Women of Today.
The results
The radio competition with the “In the Kitchen” sponsorship and trailers campaign generated 14% reach among the advertiser’s target and an ‘opportunity to hear’ of 8.1.
The article posted on the VivaCité site generated high amount of views and led to a large number of registrations for the contest, which translated into a participation rate of 8%.
Conclusion
The DELA case demonstrates that the creative use of media can help communicate on all subject matters, even the most difficult ones. The campaign also showcased the complementarity of press and radio that goes beyond simply optimising reach. Radio with its fast, spontaneous delivery, was the ideal medium to recruit participants for a competition. With the magazine and its integrated advertising formats the DELA activation lasts beyond the campaign. Once detached from the magazine, the recipe book offers a certain ‘permanence’ to the advertiser’s message. The two media each fulfilled a specific mission, thus contributing equally to the success of the campaign.