Simon Canning | April 03, 2008
TELSTRA is seeking to revitalise interest in its under-performing Trading Post Group by relaunching the classifieds brand in a substantial advertising campaign this weekend.
Since being bought by Telstra-owned directories company Sensis for $336 million four years ago, the Trading Post paper has come under increased pressure from websites such as eBay, which have managed to usurp its print-based model.
Trading Post Group marketing manager Kellie Cordner said Sensis spent more than 14 months working on the campaign, which was created by Publicis Mojo in Melbourne.
Last year Sensis was forced to take a $110 million write-down on Trading Post due to its poor performance, but Telstra chief Sol Trujillo maintained the division would be a future growth centre.
Ms Cordner said Sensis had stabilised sales of the print version after several years of losing readership and was gaining increased traffic to its website.
That site now boasts two million users each month.
The new ad campaign, which features the tagline "At Trading Post we love happy endings", has been designed to try to capture some of the humour that helped make the brand famous in the movie The Castle, while moving the image of the brand forward.
In the film, the Kerrigan family treat the classifieds paper as a bible, with star Michael Caton regularly responding to the cost of items for sale with the line "tell 'em they're dreamin'."
"The campaign extends the down-to-earth qualities depicted in the film while also showing the modern and contemporary nature of Trading Post today," Ms Cordner said.
"We have gone through quite a comprehensive look at the whole brand essence of Trading Post and making sure we got itright.
"We have had in the last half of this financial year substantial print revenue and online has also performed well."
She said while the image of The Castle and the Kerrigan family had become inextricably linked with the brand, it was "time to take a fresh look".
Marketing for the brand had taken a back seat during the past two years as Sensis considered what to do with the business.
Regular rumours circulated that the print edition could be closed for the brand to focus entirely online, for example.
The new campaign was the first stage of bringing the Trading Post brand back into the public consciousness. "We have gone down an exhaustive path on this and we had to get the right people," Ms Cordner said.
Sensis had also put the campaign through extensive research and presented it to focus groups in a bid to get the message right.