Case Studies

Dallas Morning News & The Trade Desk

Blending science and creative innovation to increase subscribers

Results

Results from our partnership far exceeded benchmarks from more traditional news advertising, and many of the new subscribers came from well outside the DFW and Texas geographic area. In addition to the increase in new subscribers (our target was exceeded by 71%), this partnership achieved:

+154%

Increase in Unique Visitors

+97%

Increase in Clicks in 3 Months

-9%

Decline in CPA

About the Brand

The Dallas Morning News is a daily newspaper serving the Dallas–Fort Worth area of Texas, but its reach extends far beyond. It is among the country’s most respected news brands whose marketing efforts have been recognized as among the most effective in the news business.

The Trade Desk is a technology company that empowers buyers of advertising. Through its self-service, cloud-based platform, ad buyers can create, manage, and optimize digital advertising campaigns across ad formats and devices. Integrations with major data, inventory, and publisher partners ensure maximum reach and decisioning capabilities, and enterprise APIs enable custom development on top of the platform.

The Story

Our teams were challenged to drastically increase new subscriber acquisition scale from the digital channel, moving beyond the core geographic and demographic targeting that had driven DMN’s success to date. We wanted to do it in a more brand- and customer-focused way that led with content, not trial discounts.

The Rakuten Advertising Solution

We partnered with The Trade Desk to create a plan leveraging the power and timeliness of content to drive more site browsing, subscriptions, and lower CPAs. Our teams created individually targeted ads that were presented alongside real-time headlines to the intended prospects.

The Trade Desk and DMN used pinpoint RSS feeds to populate the creative, focusing on what would grab the attention of the viewer. In addition, we extended the geographic reach of the DMN viewers outside of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metro area.