Product category:
Direct marketing agencies
News Release from: bright
Edited by the Marketingservicestalk Editorial
Team on 09 January 2008
Ancestry.co.uk turns to direct response
press ads
Online family and social history website Ancestry.co.uk is using direct response press advertising to encourage more people to buy its product and increase its customer database.
The acquisition direct response advertising campaign will run this month timed to capitalise on families having been brought together for Christmas The campaign is through marketing agency bright and will use national press advertising, inserts, email marketing and online advertising to drive interest to the site
This article was originally published on Marketingservicestalk on 4 Jul 2008 at 8.00am (UK)
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Britons know less about their family roots than their European counterparts, according to research by Ancestry.co.uk, which highlights that knowledge of their own family history is weakest in the UK compared to families in Germany, France, Italy and Sweden.
The campaign, which has three different creative executions, will include press and digital advertising, direct mail and inserts.
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will run in half and full-page format across a range of national newspapers titles including weekend supplements such as The Daily Mail Weekend magazine and Telegraph magazine as well as a broad range of general interest titles including Computer Active and BBC Homes and Antiques.
An insert campaign will support the advertising in titles such as the Marks and Spencer magazine 'Your MandS'.
In addition to the advertising campaign, bright has created online advertising which will run through to February 2008.
The advertising copy, tone and tempo all works hard to encourage people to visit the ancestry site and trace their family tree back through millions of historical records.
Ancestry is the leading online family history resource with eight websites globally, and has already helped over 270 million people to build their family trees and discover their ancestors.
This advertising campaign is particularly targeting men and woman over 45 years old, who are computer savvy and very family oriented.
The three creative themes - Industrialist, Drunkard and Bigamist - are designed to pique people's interest in researching their family tree, particularly now that Ancestry.co.uk is the only site with all the censuses, 1841 - 1901 for England, Scotland and Wales, and with 800 million names recorded back to the 1500s.
All three adverts suggest that back in the archives your family could have a wealthy industrialist, a drunkard, an illegitimate child or clandestine adoption or even a royal blood connection.
The possibilities of discovery are only a click away with the huge incentive of a 14-day free trial.
Popular BBC TV programme 'Who do you think you are?' has done much to increase the rapidly growing field of online genealogical searches, but it seems the UK has some catching up to do.
In recent Ancestry.co.uk research Brits demonstrated ignorance of family war heroes, with one in three (28 per cent) unable to say whether a relative had fought in a world war, compared to just in one in seven (15 per cent) Germans, and one in five in French (20 per cent) and Italians (21 per cent).
Carolyn Hardy, Senior Marketing Manager at Ancestry.co.uk, believes the popularity of genealogy is a mix of nosy celebrity culture and the renaissance of family values amongst people.
She said: "You only have to look at any newspaper, magazine or TV show to learn more than you may want to about pop or soap stars.
"Such revelations do actually inspire people to look into their own family backgrounds and our site has a huge number of historical records, as well as easy-to-use software and other tools to make researching family history easy, efficient and fun".
Commenting on the campaign, Chris Martin, Creative Director, bright, said: "This is the first time we've tried a hugely emotional execution; outing a Bigamist or Drunkard might be considered controversial but I think it's the desire to know what glory or skeletons are in the cupboard is all part of the call to action motivation".
Ancestry.co.uk research reveals that the average British family can trace their lineage back just 128 years, which is in stark contrast to the average Swede, whose family line goes back more than 200 years".
Residents of each country were tested on their basic family history knowledge and scored on criteria including naming their grandparents' birthplace, which was known by less than half of Brits (46 per cent) in comparison to over six in ten Italians (69 per cent), Germans (68 per cent) and French families (63 per cent) and over half of Swedes (53 per cent).
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