Google Digital News Initiative

Journalism is going through dizzying change. The traditional model is under huge pressure from competing news sources, social media and falling ad revenues.

But the spread of fake news and misinformation makes reliable, high-quality journalism more important than ever.

To help journalism thrive in the digital age, Google’s Digital News Initiative (DNI) runs the Digital News Innovation Fund. The Fund issues grants to support projects at news organisations across Europe.

Google wanted to highlight the importance of innovation in journalism, in particular, how technology can make it better and more reliable.

The campaign objective was twofold: to raise awareness of the DNI Fund and to spark innovation in journalism.

The FT has first-hand experience of how technology can help journalism stay on top of reader habits and global trends.

We also know how quality news coverage helps us cut through the noise online.

Looking at the way Google’s Digital Innovation Fund projects help to battle misinformation and create better journalism, we saw that explaining some of these exciting case studies to relevant audiences could raise awareness – and could even spark further innovative ideas.

An analysis of the target audience showed that an integrated print and digital campaign would have the most impact. An online content hub would enable Google to target more specific readers, give the content more longevity and allow them to add new content as and when the next round of funding was announced.

The client already had great video content, so we came up with a campaign that would use these videos and add bespoke FT content.

We split the campaign in two. The first burst was a printed magazine in the FT newspaper, and case study videos on FT.com, followed a few months later by a series of explainers about the technologies on a bespoke content hub

The campaign did extremely well, clocking up over 9 million impressions, over 40,000 videos views and an average time on page of 3.35 minutes. Several metrics significantly outperformed the FT benchmark.

• Wide reader interest. Overall, the campaign achieved 41k page/video views.

• Strong (and growing) engagement. The average time on page was 3.35 minutes, 68% higher than the FT benchmark – and this increased steadily throughout the campaign.

• Ideal audiences for our client. The biggest share of clicks on FT.com came from readers in the Comms, Publishing & Media segment. 29% of the total audience were C-suites and 35% were business decision-makers – both highly influential in determining digital strategy.

• Extensive reach. Our marketing reach hit 9.3 million – including 2.09 million marketing traffic drivers, 3.49 million in article impressions and 3.1 million web app impressions.