... or are we surrounding the world? A young news tabloid that no longer sees its competition in printed daily papers but in increasingly popular online news sites. A critical target audience that spends more time on the Internet than with any other medium. An authentic campaign that addresses a very relevant cultural phenomenon: our daily and seemingly natural interaction with a medium none of us would ever want to do without anymore. A strategy and a campaign by Dorten. For WELT KOMPAKT.
Dorten hasn’t exactly been conspicuously producing a lot of classical ad campaigns so far – how does this job for WELT KOMPAKT fit with your positioning?
If you’re really creatively free and media neutral in your work, you can’t disregard using classical media channels also. Our clients value that we make full use of the possibilities of marketing and beyond for their ventures. It has always been our most important claim to look for the right strategy and story first and then decide which channels and media make the most sense. That’s exactly the way we worked on this job. We believe it’s the right strategy to communicate to people who usually don’t read a newspaper. And we’re sure that we are touching upon a cultural phenomenon that hasn’t been discussed enough. This phenomenon – our constantly evolving, sometimes even mechanical, unconscious handling of the Internet – is the communication format, not the resulting ads in various forms. It’s our very ambitious goal to start a controversial discussion with this campaign about media competence and incompentence. We all love the Internet, but are we ready for it? Are we masters of the medium or is it the other way round? To start such a dialogue, you need a good trigger – and this one can be very well transmitted via classical media.
What sets your work apart from conventional advertising?
Hopefully, the effect it has ... in the end its about getting people interested in this new concept for a newspaper and to make them readers! The way we do it is very like Dorten: for example working together with the young artist and photographer Sascha Weidner. Most of the images come from his huge catalogue of imagery he’s been building up over the last couple of years. He captures his own surroundings in uandorned reality pictures. We really liked that for the campaign. We found most of the material for the cinema and TV ads on YouTube and got into contact with the authors. The voice in the spots is part of the target audience herself and she fully backs what we’ve put on paper for her to read aloud. Even the music for the ads comes from two artists and not from highly paid soundtrack composers. Add to that the unusual boldness of the client to not talk about his product but to talk of the freakiness of modern social behaviour. This almost journalistic quality makes the campaign very special to us. The editorial staff of WELT KOMPAKT are totally committed to all this, by the way. You will see this in articles that will appear in parallel which look at how we use the Internet – all with an amusing touch, but not uncritical.
The claim “Kurz. Anders. Gedruckt” or “Short. Different. Printed.” for WELT KOMPAKT was also developed by Dorten. Is it still sensible to try to sell a printed paper to an Internet-oriented target group?
I definitely don’t believe that the Internet will render all daily newspapers obsolete. Still, our media consumption is already changing with lightning speed. Every newspaper should ask itself if it still fits into the world of its target group – contentwise and in terms of its physical format. WELT KOMPAKT has developed well over the last years while the market in general has had a very tough time. So they seem to be doing some things right. The claim wants to transport that exactly: This newspaper informs its readers quickly and transparently, it presents different and much younger content – but it remains and wants to be after all a printed newspaper.
