During the early ‘90’s, John services were regularly engaged by News Limited, with his role being to devise and produce promotional concepts which stimulated repetitive purchasing of the company’s newspapers.
News Limited newspapers are featured in every capital city in Australia and John’s role was to provide creative “continuity programs” which would hook consumers into regularly buying the publications.
Major competitor, Fairfax Pty. Ltd., also used John’s services in a similar capacity. Given the specified “target audience demographic” of predominately adults 30-54 years of age, John recognised that promotional concepts aimed at gratifying “children” would most likely be the most successful. (Sort of similar to the McDonalds’ marketing principles if you like).
Therefore, he proceeded to conceive many “continuity promotional concepts” which were designed to provide school age children with high-perceived benefits, ensuring that the good old formula of “pester power” worked it’s magic on Mum and Dad!
The formula was quite simple, yet amazingly potent:
- Come up with an exciting entertainment or sporting theme which appealed to children en masse.
- Insert a “freebie” (i.e. a free sample of the collectable series) in the newspaper that launches the promotion. (i.e.: normally the Sunday edition).
- Promote the need for readers to purchase 3 or 4 weeks worth of newspapers in order to collect the tokens and redeem them with “x cents” at their local newsagent, for each part of the collectable series.
- Stand back and watch the concept automatically sell newspapers!
At the request of numerous newspaper groups, John also devised and produced many different Bingo Game formats, whereby a Gamecard would be distributed through the newspaper and readers would need to repetitively purchase further newspapers to gain the Bingo numbers to check against their card.
John produced most of the scratch Bingo games for the newspaper groups up until the mid ‘90’s, with many of these games breaking circulation records for the newspaper groups.
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