Success Story

KBC needed to reach three very specific audiences with information about their student loan, mortgage, and home improvement loan products. They wanted to do this in a way that made them the most approachable bank for those audiences, by treating them with respect and intelligence. And they were able to share insights about the challenges those audiences were facing.

We came up with a content plan that on the one hand, answers KBC’s needs by targeting the audience they want to reach, on the issues they want to raise. And on the other hand, meets the needs of our audience by delivering a project with the journalistic value to live alongside, and as part of, the news and insights that our reporters produce every day.

We called that project Change Generation. Change Generation chronicles the challenges faced by young adults in Ireland making the biggest decisions of their lives - from students to new homeowners, and everything in between. By leveraging the expertise of our newsdesk to write about the people facing these life changes - taking one key demographic group a month, for three months - this series creates and defines these niche audiences from the readership of TheJournal.ie.

For KBC, this content allows them to reach key audiences in a highly targeted manner, and to associate their products with the support and information we are offering, in a dedicated project hub on our platforms.

Change Generation is an in-depth journalistic series and how are readers engaged with the content allows us to can identify groups, look at their behaviours, and place them in buckets for retargeting.

This allows KBC to segment out their audiences even within the Change Generation series. To collect an audience of students through content, and market student products directly to them. To collect another audience of new homeowners. And so on.

Each audience identifies itself by consuming the content, so the cycle would not be possible - those buckets would be worthless - without that original content delivering a genuine value to the people reading it.

This case study shows how we can use content to reach into our mass audience and carve out segments which are meaningful to advertisers.