Schibsted’s Aftenposten, the largest subscription newspaper and one of the largest online newspapers in Norway, launched its local digital newspaper, Osloby.no, in the summer of 2012.

Targeting young urban readers, the newspaper was launched simultaneously on mobile and tablet platforms, and took the top position in Norway’s biggest city, Oslo, just weeks after launching.

Osloby.no approached Cubus, one of Scandinavia’s largest fashion retail chains, to introduce its new advertising toolkit.

Although Cubus has more than 300 shops and 2,000 employees, it faced such challenges as:

• Strong competition locally in Oslo, especially against international retail chains such as H&M and Zara.
  
  
• An inability to reach out to young urban adults.
  
  
• A history of failing to connect with customers via digital marketing and communication.

Osloby.no now had the attention of Cubus’ most coveted market, but the retailer was skeptical of digital as a media channel and wanted to measure its campaign’s effectiveness based on increased offline retail sales in Oslo.

Those sales would be benchmarked against the rest of the country and the revenue from the year before. Osloby.no engineered the design, layout, and content of the display ads in the campaign period, targeting young urban females with interests in fashion and shopping.

The campaign ran exclusively in online, mobile and tablet platforms to ensure exact campaign measurement.

Over a three-month period, store sales in Oslo increased more than 10% and boasted click-through rates at 0.4 percent on average on online, mobile, and tablet.

Aftenposten then showed Cubus new rich media formats and Rising Star formats developed with partner Adform, which presented new possibilities to communicate, engage, and interact with potential customers.

The campaign invited Osloby.no users into a showroom and let them decide what products to see, get styling tips, and watch new releases and campaign film — all enabling the users to interact and engage with the customer brand and products.

The rich media and Rising Star formats allow publishers and customers to track user behaviour in new ways, tracking user engagement and involvement, time spent, and what the users actually do inside the banner space instead of focusing on amounts of impressions and click-through rates.

By allowing the user to decide what to do within the banner, they have more control, which leads to a lower bounce rate.

The Cubus campaign provided amazing results immediately, which lasted the duration of the campaign. With user engagement rate at 78% on average, four out of five users on Osloby.no engaged and interacted with the ad. Aaverage time spent in the ad was 74.5 seconds.

“We measured a substantial increase in sales by advertising on Osloby,” says Elise Mietle Laupstad, e-marketing manager at Cubus. “Revenue from women’s fashion in the Oslo stores increased with 10% more than the stores in the rest of the country. This is great because we’ve been looking for a channel that can help us to lift our Oslo stores. Together with Aftenposten/Osloby, we have also developed and launched an exciting Rising Star format that we look forward to see how it will interact and evolve.”

By letting the customer reach out and interact with existing and potential customers in completely different and more engaging ways than any other media channels, Cubus was able to completely change its relationship with the user.

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