CIB’s significant ‘Advance’ for Corus

CIB Communications worked closely with the Corus in-house marketing team to develop a print and online campaign to build awareness of the Advance section range amongst their target audience of architects, structural engineers, civil engineers, consultants and property developers.

The Advance section range was developed to reflect current structural design practice and make it easier to specify Corus CE marked structural sections compliant with the EU Directive on Construction Products. Advance is the new identity for structural sections from Corus. The brand name applies to all the sections Corus manufacture for the UK market, including beams, columns, channels, angles, and bearing piles.

CIB in conjunction with the Corus in-house marketing campaign negotiated a package of activity with EMAP across Construction News, Architects Journal and New Civil Engineer magazines. The campaign spanned run of paper advertising, online activity and a linked editorial idea developed by CIB asking some of the most respected names in the industry to put forward their ‘Greatest Advance in Construction’, which was Corus branded and linked back to the advertising creative and ‘Advance’ sections.

A 4pp editorial launch ran in the 9th October 2008 issues of each of the 3 magazines with an introduction about how innovations drive our industry forward. 12 advances were put forward by the likes of Ken Shuttleworth and Peter Rogers along with the editor of each magazine. Subsequently each title ran monthly editorial on ‘The Greatest Advance in Construction’ each time focussing on 3 or more new ‘Advances’ put forward by well known movers and shakers in the industry. Readers were encouraged throughout the campaign to submit their own ‘Greatest Advance’ via email or via an online form and had the ability to comment on any of the ‘Advances’ that had featured in the campaign to date via a dedicated section of each magazines’ website.

Towards the end of the 6 month campaign (February 2009), the ‘Greatest Advances’ submitted were cut down to a shortlist of 10 by the editors of Construction News, Architects Journal and New Civil Engineer magazines and readers were invited to vote. This voting established a top 3 for each magazine and the results were then published in a 4pp editorial write up in the 2nd April 2009 issues of the 3 magazines.

CIB developed high impact advertising creative that ran concurrently with the editorial which was designed to place the advance section as the ‘hero’ of the ads. Utilising bold ‘Corus’ colours 5 executions were developed - a generic execution along with 4 ads that each focussed one of the ‘pillars’ of Corus. The ‘advance’ section illustration that was used within the advertising creative was also used as the sign off branding for ‘The Greatest Advance in Construction’ providing a consistent theme across both advertising and editorial.

Measurement and Results

The success of the campaign was reflected in the calibre of people who participated in submitting their opinion as to the ‘Greatest Advance’. These included Ken Shuttleworth, Wayne Hemmingway, Isi Meitzstein, John Armit, Roger Bullivant, Kevin McLeod, Peter Rogers and Julia Barfield to name just a few.

In total, the dedicated sections to ‘The Greatest Advance in Construction’ on the 3 magazines website - cnplus.co.uk, architectsjournal.com and nce.co.uk generated 37,530 page impressions over the duration of the 3 months campaign.
cnplus.co.uk - 11,167 page impressions
architectsjournal.com - 12,181 page impressions
nce.co.uk - 14,182 page impressions

The banner and skyscraper ads that ran across all 3 sites requesting that readers
submit their own ‘Greatest Advance’ had an average click through rate of 0.1%.

In total 1494 readers voted for one of the shortlisted 10 ‘Greatest Advances in Construction’ - 640 from Construction News, 562 from New Civil Engineer and 292 from Architects Journal. The overall winner across the 3 magazines was CAD/CAM based on the voting. What was particularly interesting though was the respective importance that readers from the different magazines placed on the various ‘advances’. Although CAD/CAM scored highly across all 3, the likes of health and safety divided opinion. It was these differences that really added to the editorial and were picked up on by the editors when commenting.