Campaign live relaunch

Launched as a weekly magazine in London in 1968, Campaign blossomed into a globally-networked franchise providing real-time news and analysis by expert commentators in eight territories around the world. So, in May 2016, Haymarket Publishing united Marketing, Media Week, and Brand Republic under the Campaign banner.

When four leading sites aimed at advertising and marketing professionals joined forces, the challenge of integrating all content sets, editorial styles and user bases into one site was clear.

We started by creating user profiles and analysing the current sites in order to find commonalities and differences. We also analysed competitor sites and interviewed industry professionals. Although the content and user bases were broadly overlapping, we identified gaps in the content and got the editors of each site to address these.

As one of the requirements for the new site was for it to be engaging to an audience used to judging visual content, we realised that the site would heavily rely on beautiful imagery and that the text content would sometimes take a back seat. This also meant that the site itself would need to be clean and clear, with simple fonts and enough white space to make the content shine.

In addition to providing static content about agencies and brands, it would also showcase new adverts and marketing content, as well as news and temporary content. We started at the bottom and after understanding the different content types we needed to cater for, we started at the bottom and created a variety of modules which could be put together into larget blocks and finally into individual pages.

Once we had an idea of a site design and information architecture that we were all happy with and were approved by stakeholders, we created a functional prototype and invited both existing users and non-users to test it. The overall global editor, as well as other stakeholders, were invited to attend these sessions, and from that we got an understanding of the issues we were still to resolve as well as our successes.

The Campaign Live site was successfully launched in May 2016, and has since grown to inglude sites in Japan, China, India, and the US.