The Times Higher Education (THE) was awarded the Gold Award for the ‘Most effective promotional campaign by a smaller magazine*’ at the Association of Circulation Executives (ACE) Press Awards 2009.
Judges commended TSL’s entry submission, which highlighted innovative thinking and excellent teamwork between the THE’s editorial, newstrade and subscriptions teams, saying: “This category proved to be a real challenge. However a clear winner is TSL Education who cleverly used controlled circulation to generate sales.”
TSL’s entry submission was based around the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which happens only once every seven years, during which an independent assessment is made of quality research teams and institutions across all disciplines with the results, ranked accordingly.
While this afforded a unique opportunity for the THE team to drive sales for that period, their efforts could have been potentially hampered by the fact that the RAE announcement date was 18 December – a challenging week for sales given university vacations and the fact that many university shops would indeed be closed during that period.
TSL overcame these challenges with an inspired campaign to drive sales during this ‘once in seven years opportunity’ by converting monitored free copies to newstand sales, facilitating an online pre-order single copy subscription and by securing a highly sought-after check-out position in 150 Sainsbury stores. The result: a fantastic 37% increase in newstrade sales.
About the ACE Awards
Now in their nineteenth year, the ACE Awards recognise and reward the achievements of publishers, wholesalers, distributors and providers across twelve award categories including ‘Circulation excellence by a national newspaper’ and -new for 2009 – the ‘ACE Sustainability Award’.
The event, which took place on Wednesday 25 March 2009 at The Intercontinental Hotel, Park Lane, London, was attended by over 300 people and was hosted by Irish TV presenter Trish Lynch.
*Refers to magazines with a circulation up to 50,000.
For more information please contact:
Communications Manager Nina Iles, 020 3194 3266 or 07761 583310
Greg Frost, Head of Newstand and Operations, 020 3194 3065