I recall my early years in brand management, working on my first ever press campaign, back then I worked for a large pharmaceutical company with big budgets, so no one batted an eye lid when the ad agency gave us a quote for tens of thousands of pounds for two relatively simple press ads. Someone somewhere was seriously making a lot of money back then!

So, almost twenty years on and having worked on more press campaigns than I care to remember, I have to say that whilst as a young marketer it was a lot of fun working with big marketing budgets, these days I genuinely get a lot more satisfaction working on behalf of clients where I am able to get them a lot more bang for their buck.

As a case in point, we were recently set a nice challenge from our client Summer Infant; they wanted us to launch their new range of UME pushchairs in an already very competitive market and on a fairly modest budget.

We took on the challenge with open arms, we came up with a communications strategy that combines what we call “bread & butter” activity (the grassroots cost effective stuff) with a more farther reaching media campaign working with one of the large parenting media owners. The guys at Immediate Media came up with a great proposal, targeting parents-to-be and new parents both on-line and in print. It all sounded great, but the dilemma came when we realised that to take advantage of the display pages in Prima baby magazine we needed some really good creative press ads – which we didn’t have!

Here comes the creative thinking bit…. We had a vision of a press campaign that would take one of the key benefits of the UME pushchair and then depict it using a super cute image of a baby to draw you into the advert. But to do that, we needed to find someone to produce these super cute baby photographs – which ordinarily would come at quite a cost.   So, we did some research and came across Bambini Baby Photography in Brighton, who we contacted and suggested we partner together to run a competition to find the “Face of UME” with the idea of using the competition winner’s baby photos as the focal point of our advertising. Luckily for us, the amazing Beth from Bambini Baby was open to our idea and we worked together to find our baby, we ran a simple competition on our social media platforms and were inundated with entries.

Everything seemed to piece together nicely, we worked with the designers at Prism Production who produce great creative at a fraction of the price of most London agencies; so with their design skills coupled with Bambini Baby’s beautiful photography, we now have two lovely press ads which I have to say I am particularly proud of and believe it or not the total cost of production came in at around 5% of what I paid for two press ads all those years ago – not bad eh??

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