Subscribe to the Facts
El PAÍS
Issue 57 | December 2020
Agency
Shackleton
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer/ copywriter Juan Nonzioli Creative Director Teresa Galante Head of Art Celia Martínez Creative Team Cristina Pintos, Miguel Aliena, Guillermo Ipas, Pablo Campoamor, Sergio Belmonte
Production Team
Audiovisual Production Team Manuela Zamora, Cristina Cortizas, Paloma Martín, Paco Carpio, Juan Acosta, Nacho Rengifo Digital Production Lucía García, Patricia Torregrosa, Nuria San José, Cecilia Pastorino
Other Credits
General Manager Lucía Angulo Account Team Jaime Díez, Santiago Vardé, Paula Criado Graphic Studio Josué Hernández, Sandra Freitas
Date
March 2020
Background
El PAÍS launched a digital version of the newspaper in 1996. The time had come to ask people to pay for this content, which they were accustomed to getting for free.
Idea
"Subscribe to the facts" was a multimedia, multi-execution campaign made up of real sounds and images that aimed to convey the facts to the public and remind it of the utility of being informed while showcasing themes typically characteristic of the newspaper's editorial content, such as ecology, individual rights, education, technology and current events.
Results
52,000 digital subscribers were garnered in less than 6 weeks, 48% ahead of the objective, taking El PAÍS to the second highest number of subscribers, behind only Eldiario.es (56,000), which introduced its paywall in 2013.
In April alone, during the peak of the pandemic, the newspaper brought in one million new registered users.
Our Thoughts
This campaign isn’t particularly creative, if Shackleton will forgive me for saying, but it didn’t need to be. What the agency has done is allow the brand to speak for itself.
A brand is nothing more and nothing less than the degree of trust you have in the product and what the agency have nailed here is how trustworthy El PAÍS is.
It was founded in the first months after Franco’s death in 1976 and represents the country’s open, democratic values.
It challenged the military and opposed political corruption. At a time now when fake news muddies truth and influences election results, trust becomes very important indeed. In some ways, trust in El PAÍS is actually increased by asking people to pay for it. Every subscriber has joined the resistance to anti-democratic chicanery.