10th Anniversary of the Children's Laureate

The objective:

• To generate stand-out coverage around the Anniversary of the Children’s Laureate
• To ensure a strong share of voice for Waterstones (our client and the main sponsor of the Children’s Laureate)
• To be mindful of not taking up too much of the Laureates’ time with press activity (as the esteemed authors had already signed up for two major events).

The approach:

We decided to focus our attention on a news story that would require minimal promotional time from the Laureates, and that would tie-in with the launch of The Laureates’ Table, a promotion at Waterstone’s featuring the five Laureates’ favourite children’s titles.

We spent hours poring over the list of titles on The Laureates’ Table, looking for interesting facts and creating angles that would bring the story to life. We carefully pulled together many intriguing slants, whilst making reference to Waterstone’s at every point in a way that seemed vital to the story itself (it was by no means a given that the bookseller would be mentioned).

The timing of the story was crucial. We released the story under embargo to our contacts across both print and broadcast at carefully orchestrated times, in order to maximize coverage in the press the next day. In one slightly hairy moment, the website of a major national newspaper broke the embargo by three hours. We reacted quickly and decisively, and a swift call to the paper saw the story being pulled down immediately.

The results:

Our story was featured in every quality newspaper the next day, almost all dedicating half a page to coverage, with the Times even featuring it on the masthead. Waterstone's were mentioned in every piece. Follow-up feature coverage appeared in G2, Times 2 (we conducted vox-pops with 10-year-olds on the supplement’s behalf), the Daily Telegraph and the TES.

Our schedule of broadcast coverage included interviews with the Laureates on The Today Programme (BBC Radio 4), The Simon Mayo Show (BBC Radio Live 5), The World Today (BBC World Service), with additional coverage on Radio 5 Live’s Breakfast Show (the presenters discussed the story for a full hour!), LBC, BBC Scotland and BBC Wales.

The story was also a huge hit online, with news and comment coverage on hundreds of websites and blogs, including, most notably, the BBC website (flagged on the home-page), the websites of all the national newspapers, MSN and Jon Snow’s blog.

Both Waterstone's and Booktrust were thrilled with the campaign - not only did it reach millions of readers and listeners, it encouraged debate about children's literature and massively raised the profile of the Anniversary. The estimated value of coverage was well over £1.5 million.