New Canadian Media: The Missing 2023
Brand Strategy & Development
Content Marketing
Digital Marketing
Website Development
Project Overview
Barrett and Welsh created Missing for journalism non-profit New Canadian Media. This advertising campaign increases awareness of the inequities in Canadian journalism and raises funds to sustain its award-winning work to rebalance these inequities. Objectives Largely funded through Government grants, New Canadian Media needed to raise funds year-round through a direct donation campaign targeting individual donors in order to sustain its groundbreaking work. The campaign needed to: Leverage Giving Tuesday and the giving season for campaign launch Create awareness of the inequities in Canadian news reporting and a sense of urgency to fix it Increase general brand awareness for New Canadian Media and its work.
Details
Insight
When immigrant and refugee journalists don’t find a place in mainstream Canadian newsrooms, neither do their stories.
Our strategy
Appeal to donors’ innate sense of justice.
Make them aware that the stories of immigrant journalists are largely missing from Canadian news reporting because these journalists are kept out of Canadian newsrooms by systemic economic and social barriers.
Use this to create a sense of urgency to support New Canadian Media’s vital, award-winning work to rebalance Canadian news.
The Unlock
When journalists go missing in oppressive regimes, it sends an urgent signal to the world that a terrible injustice is afoot.
The exclusion of immigrant and refugee journalists has silenced them in Canada almost as effectively as the countries they fled once did. It’s an injustice that merits an urgent response.
Our Big Idea
CANADIAN JOURNALISTS ARE MISSING
The creative expression
The campaign was launched with creative designed to shock our targets and create a sense of urgency.
Borrowing from the visual language of a missing person poster, the post’s bold headline — MISSING — was accompanied by an image of the journalist.
Subsequent posts offered more context and explained how these journalists had “gone missing” in Canada of all places.
Throughout, attention-grabbing headlines coupled with intriguing, supporting text encouraged readers to explore the story in its entirety by clicking on the campaign URL.
This awareness and fundraising digital advertising campaign for New Canadian Media used owned media as the primary vehicle. New Canadian Media’s social media platforms (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) were the ignition point for the campaign, supported by emailers and a run-of-site digital outreach that included the website, pop-up ads, static big box units, and a microsite with individual landing pages for each of the “missing” journalists.
A carefully designed microsite resided at the thought-provoking URL the-missing.ca and served as the heart of the campaign.
Here, visitors could read each “missing” journalist’s complete story and learn how pervasive the exclusion of immigrant and refugee journalists is in Canadian newsrooms.
Each microsite page told the story of an individual missing journalist, their extensive experience, how courageously they covered difficult stories in their home countries, the threats they faced there, their move to Canada, and finally, how their hopes of finally practising their craft with freedom were dashed when they were silenced and denied employment in Canada.
Each page on the microsite underscores why this is important – WHEN JOURNALISTS ARE MISSING, SO IS THE NEWS.
Call-to-action buttons strategically placed across each microsite page, encourage readers to BRING BACK THE NEWS THAT’S MISSING by supporting New Canadian Media with a donation so it can ensure immigrant stories are told, and immigrant journalists are heard.
Results
This phase of the campaign launched on Giving Tuesday and ran during the Giving Season. It provoked the desired response immediately: readers were concerned by the disappearance of a Canadian journalist.
Social Media: 38 posts generated 28,154 views, 1,188 link clicks, 22.3% engagement rate (vs. 0.05–2.5% benchmark).
Microsite: 1,894 page views, robust engagement with personalized stories.
Email Campaigns: 54% open rate (vs. 22.1% benchmark).
Google Ads: 3.94% CTR from 1,894 impressions.
Not bad for a $0 campaign investment.
When immigrant and refugee journalists don’t find a place in mainstream Canadian newsrooms, neither do their stories.
Our strategy
Appeal to donors’ innate sense of justice.
Make them aware that the stories of immigrant journalists are largely missing from Canadian news reporting because these journalists are kept out of Canadian newsrooms by systemic economic and social barriers.
Use this to create a sense of urgency to support New Canadian Media’s vital, award-winning work to rebalance Canadian news.
The Unlock
When journalists go missing in oppressive regimes, it sends an urgent signal to the world that a terrible injustice is afoot.
The exclusion of immigrant and refugee journalists has silenced them in Canada almost as effectively as the countries they fled once did. It’s an injustice that merits an urgent response.
Our Big Idea
CANADIAN JOURNALISTS ARE MISSING
The creative expression
The campaign was launched with creative designed to shock our targets and create a sense of urgency.
Borrowing from the visual language of a missing person poster, the post’s bold headline — MISSING — was accompanied by an image of the journalist.
Subsequent posts offered more context and explained how these journalists had “gone missing” in Canada of all places.
Throughout, attention-grabbing headlines coupled with intriguing, supporting text encouraged readers to explore the story in its entirety by clicking on the campaign URL.
This awareness and fundraising digital advertising campaign for New Canadian Media used owned media as the primary vehicle. New Canadian Media’s social media platforms (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) were the ignition point for the campaign, supported by emailers and a run-of-site digital outreach that included the website, pop-up ads, static big box units, and a microsite with individual landing pages for each of the “missing” journalists.
A carefully designed microsite resided at the thought-provoking URL the-missing.ca and served as the heart of the campaign.
Here, visitors could read each “missing” journalist’s complete story and learn how pervasive the exclusion of immigrant and refugee journalists is in Canadian newsrooms.
Each microsite page told the story of an individual missing journalist, their extensive experience, how courageously they covered difficult stories in their home countries, the threats they faced there, their move to Canada, and finally, how their hopes of finally practising their craft with freedom were dashed when they were silenced and denied employment in Canada.
Each page on the microsite underscores why this is important – WHEN JOURNALISTS ARE MISSING, SO IS THE NEWS.
Call-to-action buttons strategically placed across each microsite page, encourage readers to BRING BACK THE NEWS THAT’S MISSING by supporting New Canadian Media with a donation so it can ensure immigrant stories are told, and immigrant journalists are heard.
Results
This phase of the campaign launched on Giving Tuesday and ran during the Giving Season. It provoked the desired response immediately: readers were concerned by the disappearance of a Canadian journalist.
Social Media: 38 posts generated 28,154 views, 1,188 link clicks, 22.3% engagement rate (vs. 0.05–2.5% benchmark).
Microsite: 1,894 page views, robust engagement with personalized stories.
Email Campaigns: 54% open rate (vs. 22.1% benchmark).
Google Ads: 3.94% CTR from 1,894 impressions.
Not bad for a $0 campaign investment.
