A reader offer from our client, pay-as-you-go music streaming app Psonar, took up the entire top half of the front page of Saturday’s Daily Star. The reader offer was timed to run alongside the Star’s coverage of the Glastonbury Festival. Every reader was given the chance to stream music from this year’s Glastonbury stars for free on their mobile.
With 743,000 readers each Saturday, this was by far the biggest promotional give away yet arranged by Imp Communications for Psonar. The Daily Star was fully behind the promotion as well, with flashes on the bottoms of pages in the days leading up to Saturday, plugs on their website dailystar.co.uk, and even television advertising on the Star’s sister television station, Channel 5.
The mechanic for the reader offer was based on the same previously successful model used for December’s BBC Top of the Pops magazine promotion. Readers were invited to visit a custom landing page on psonar.com, designed to fit the Daily Star’s online branding. The landing page included links to the App Store and Google Play to download the Psonar app. Once installed readers only needed to enter the promo code ‘Daily Star’ as they created their Psonar account. Once this was done the Glastonbury playlist appeared automatically in the ‘Playlists’ section of the app.
The playlist promotion followed several months of discussions with the Daily Star. No money changed hands – the Daily Star provided Psonar with exposure in exchange for the chance to offer something extra with their Saturday edition. The Daily Star also only committed to covering the promotion with a third of a page on the inside of the paper. All other coverage of the promotion, including the flashes in the lead-up, the television ads, and the front page plug, were all at the discretion of the editors.
Psonar are, of course, delighted with the results. Not only is it great exposure for their brand, but it shows that major media brands are interested in working with them. It certainly will not be the last promotion we reader offer we arrange for Psonar, but it will certainly take some doing to top this one!
Stay tuned!