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Newsjacking: what it is and how to do it well
Robert J. Angell, Matthew Gorton, Juliet Memery, and John White
Introduction
In early 2009, around the same time that 44th President of the United States of America, Barack Obama, took his seat in the Oval Office for the first time, women’s cosmetic brand, Veet, ran an advertising campaign with the tagline “Goodbye Bush.” When the Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to Prince George in 2013, Johnson & Johnson posted a picture of a baby in the bath with hair washed into the shape of a crown. Likewise, confectionary brand, Oreo, ran a promotion with the tagline: “long live the crème.”
All of these examples have a common thread—a similar DNA: (i) they are all household brands; (ii) they all have a high level of consumer awareness; and (iii) they are all leveraging current affairs and topical news stories to promote a message. Whilst the first two attributes are evident in most advertising appearing on our televisions, computers and in our newspapers, the latter is a recent and growing phenomenon. This third element is known as newsjacking—the referencing of news stories in paid-for communication.
Why is it appropriate for newsjacking to appear in a book focusing on better understanding the topic of humor? As we will demonstrate, newsjacking certainly does not, by definition, need to contain any semblance of humor—but the most successful exemplars from market practice are quick-witted and amusing. In this chapter we will introduce several of the key tenets of ‘good’ newsjacking practice. Then we turn our attention to the issue of humor, and the challenge of ‘being funny.’ Finally, we investigate whether newsjacking is only as beneficial as the number of people that understand its underlying reference to a news story. To address this question we present the results of an empirical study undertaken using stimuli from a real-life newsjacking advertisement for BMW Mini.
Attributes of “good” newsjacking
To begin, it is useful to provide another (successful) example of newsjacking advertising. In 2014 during the FIFA World Cup, soccer superstar Luis Suarez from Uruguay bit into the skin of an opposing team’s player (Italian defender Georgio Chiellini). Bud Light ran an advertisement with a picture of a man (who looked uncannily like Luis Suarez) attempting to open a beer bottle with his teeth, with the tagline: “Relax, they’re twist off.” The ad quickly went viral with thousands of shares and retweets.
But why? The first reason is that the advertisement involved news. Consumer psychologist, Jonah Berger, explained in his 2013 book Contagious1 that people like to read and share information that is current, up-to-date, and innovative. It explains why people who have no formal (higher) qualifications in science or medicine, share with others in their network via social media, news of groundbreaking discoveries in either field.
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Relatedly, evidence suggests that we cognitively process novel messages in a slightly different way to less novel information. Imagine you are walking into work and see a monkey swinging in the trees of a nearby garden. Would this have your attention? Would you be intrigued? Would you stop walking? Would you begin to ask yourself questions like: “How did that monkey get there?” and “Is that a wild monkey, or a pet monkey?” Now ask yourself when was the last time you saw a bird in a neighbor’s garden? The majority of people will not remember, but it is quite likely to have been very recently. However, seeing a bird for most of us is such a commonplace occurrence, we do not choose to deeply process this event.2 In their theory known as the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), psychologists Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo3 suggested that humans process information via two routes—a central processing route, which provides a deeper, more involved, assessment of information, and the peripheral route which is shallower, and less long-lasting in a working memory sense. Whilst there are many antecedents for either route, information that is novel and personally relevant is more likely to be centrally processed—and this leads to higher working memory and affective evaluations. We can apply this logic to the Bud Light advertisement. You are likely to have seen dozens of beer commercials, many of which will involve 20–30 second acted scenes using phrases like “refreshing,” “crisp,” “cool.” But how many of these can you remember? Moreover, how many of these ads did you really like? Would you be likely to forget, or dislike, the Luis Suarez ad though? Our guess would be “no.”
The second component of successful newsjacking is timing. The Bud Light ad was circulated within less than two hours of the biting incident. Would it have received so much attention and interest if it were released after two weeks, or a month? PR gurus often argue that bad news will end up being tomorrow’s chip wrapping.4 David Meerman-Scott—an expert in newsjacking—suggests that an ideal window of time exists for a newsjacking ad to be successful. Generally speaking this is midway between the story breaking, and the point that journalists realize the story will be a big one and scramble to get copy together. Of course, this requires some skill in itself. The company needs to be firmly on the pulse when it comes to current affairs, but also be just as good at deciding whether a story (in journalistic terms) will “blow up.” Too early, no one will understand the reference (the risks of which we empirically demonstrate later in the chapter). Too late, people might not remember, or again “realize” what the reference pertains to.
It could be argued that some newsjacking adverts have a greater longevity than others. Some news is not here today and gone tomorrow—contrary to the PR adage. Take for instance the recent US Presidential election, or Brexit. The latter has, at the time of writing, been a constant fixture in the news for over a year. World events like war and economic recessions similarly occupy far more copy space than a single day of news. So is there always a need to be swift? Although it has not been explicitly researched in a newsjacking context, exclusivity might be a reason why the answer to this question is ‘yes.’ It is possible that multiple brands piggybacking on the same news story works to reduce the novelty of the message and undermines the ability of the ad to ‘cut-through’ the cluttered media environment.5 Take for instance the world of celebrity endorsement, where research has shown that the higher the number of concurrent sponsorships a brand engages in, the more negative become consumer evaluations for each of its released ads.6 7 Of course, the latter are governed (most of the time) by legal contracts, which is not possible in a newsjacking context. Being agile and first to the market may carry its own advantages (i.e. a first mover advantage) but this has not, to date, been researched or verified.
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Congruence or fit has been studied in a wide variety of advertising, media and sponsorship contexts.8 Advertising that is perceived as congruent with the product and/or brand’s image is usually met with less skepticism and requires less effortful cognitive processing to understand (which is normally a good thing!). We tend to be more comfortable with partnerships—people and objects—when we consider them to be a more obvious fit. The same logic is critical for newsjacking advertising. Tenuous connections between the news story and the brand may appear as crass and opportunistic. For instance, DiGormo Pizza attempted to ‘newsjack’ the ‘why I stayed’ hashtag (referencing the plight of women affected by domestic violence), to promote its pizzas. Fit can be manipulated but requires a skillful marketer. Consider that Budweiser has little organic fit to Luis Suarez, but still managed to manipulate the story, actor and product to have a logical connection to its product and brand, through just a single tagline.
Does newsjacking work better when humor is used?
Until now we have not looked at the role humor plays in successful newsjacking. For every ‘great’ piece of newsjacking advertising that we see or hear about, a much larger number disappear into the ether. Of the countless ‘how to do’ newsjacking articles, blogs, and websites available to marketers online, the most cited examples tend to have employed, to some extent, humor. Indeed, you will have noticed that all of the illustrations provided at the beginning of the chapter contained an amusing tagline. That is not to say that humor has to be used. For example, the Golf Channel tweeted “Tweet your golf dream” on the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s famous speech, which was well responded to by the golf community. However, a large number of research studies have shown that humor successfully captures people’s attention9 and aids the comprehension of more difficult to process messages.10 Humor may also be a double-edged sword. If an attempt at humor is inappropriate for the audience and context, the result can cause offense and stimulate negative behaviors such as complaints and boycotting.11 This is very pertinent for newsjacking, with a large number of attempts ending in complaints by recipients (especially via Twitter and other social media platforms). For example, when Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast of the US, Urban Outfitters tweeted “This storm blows (but free shipping doesn’t)!” with the hashtag #allsoggy. In a world where media can be shared instantly, a single newsjacking mistake can be extremely damaging for the unprepared brand. Twitter users responded by berating the brand for its insensitivity to those affected.
Ability to decode news stories
A critical component of newsjacking is the recipient’s ability to decode and recognize the underlying message. Indeed, if you had not known about the Luis Suarez incident, would you (or anyone) have found the Bud Light ad amusing and engaging? As other chapters in this book discuss, a good joke tends to be one in which the receiver has to perform some mental activity to decode its underlying message. Theory suggests that solving a puzzle—be it a cryptic message or a joke—provides the recipient with gratification. In contrast, a lack of ability to process new information tends to result in shallow (peripheral) processing and suppressed affective evaluations.12 We posit that a fundamental component of newsjacking requires the recipient to be able to recognize the news story from which the ad arose, but this notion has never been formally tested. In other words, newsjacking is expected to only work well as long as the audience can decode the underlying news story—in the same way as using humor in advertising requires the audience to ‘get’ the joke. To test this assertion we undertook a study using real-life stimuli.
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The study
We recruited 126 people from a city center location in the North of England using a quota sampling procedure with an even split of men and women. Most people (86.1%) claimed to engage with the news on a daily basis. Data was collected via a face-to-face survey.
We chose to use the newsjacking advertisement by BMW Mini to promote its Mini John Cooper Works Roadster in 2013—a high-performance version of the Mini. The ad had the tagline “Beef: with a lot of horses hidden in it,” referencing the Meat Adulteration Scandal which broke in January 2013 after the Food Safety Authority of Ireland reported detecting horse DNA in 37% of the beef burger products it tested. The story ran for several weeks in the UK and other affected countries. To the best of our knowledge, no other brand used the story for the purpose of newsjacking. When we collected the data, the story was established but still regularly discussed in the media.
Before being shown the ad, respondents were asked to complete scales pertaining to: (i) their involvement with the news, and (ii) product involvement with automobiles. Both were anchored on five-point Likert scales and adapted from an original brand involvement scale.13 Next, respondents were shown the BMW newsjacking ad, and asked to complete three separate scales pertaining to their: (i) attitude towards the ad (Aad),14 (ii) brand attitude (Ba)15 and (iii) intentions towards purchasing the car (PI).16 Each was measured on seven-point semantic differential scales (−3 to +3). Finally, and most critically, at the end of the questionnaire, respondents were asked to state whether or not they ‘recognized’ the news story referenced in the ad, and then to describe it to the interviewer. In total, 61 people were ‘able’ to do so accurately, with 61 ‘unable.’ It is worth noting that six of the latter had previously believed they had decoded the reference but were unable to explain why.
See the image of the advertisement here: http://www.newsworks.org.uk/Opinion/mini-capitalises-on-horsemeat-scandal/44279.
Since we were interested in whether ability to decode the news story led to differing affective evaluations of the ad, we used a multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA). This allowed us to compare the relative mean scores for both ‘able’ and ‘unable’ groups outlined before, across each of the five scales, but with the added benefit of accounting for measurement error in each of the measures.17 We performed all of the necessary preliminary tests for this type of analysis—including tests of validity and reliability,18 but also the necessary assessment of measurement invariance (i.e. scalar invariance). Scalar invariance means that factor loadings and intercepts are equivalent in the groups specified,19 which allows latent mean scores to be compared.
In MGCFA one of the (in our case, two) groups is used as a reference category, meaning that mean scores for constructs in other groups are presented relative to the reference group (or category). In this case we specified the ‘unable’ group to be the reference category and then investigated whether any of the variables in the ‘able’ group were significantly different in their mean score. We found that people in the two groups did not differ in their rated product involvement (with automobile cars) (i.e. Δ 
= .29, p > .10).20 This served as a strong test of face validity, since there should be no rationale why one group would be more (or less) interested in cars. Next we looked at whether news involvement differed. Unsurprisingly, those in the ‘able’ group were significantly higher in their interest/involvement with current affairs (Δ = 1.13, p < .01). Again, this served as a useful test of face validity since it would be expected that those able to recognize the news story in a newsjacking message should be higher in news involvement than those who could not.
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Most importantly we investigated whether Aad, BA, and PI differed between the groups. We found significant differences with those respondents who correctly identified (able) the story having higher levels of attitude towards the advertisement (Δ = 1.32, p < .01), brand attitude (Δ = 0.57, p < .01), and purchase intention (Δ = 0.52, p < .01) than ‘unable’ respondents. Overall, the data indicates that an ability to decode a newsjacking message is therefore an important antecedent for higher affective evaluations; essentially, the results provide evidence that recipients do need to ‘get it’ for newsjacking advertising to work effectively.
Conclusions
In this chapter, we introduced newsjacking, a practically important, but under-researched, advertising methodology. In the last five years it has been used increasingly—with differing degrees of success. Of course, for a method that, to some extent, relies on consumer sharing and pass-on, the vast majority of newsjacking attempts never arrive in our consciousness. In fact, consumers tend to be most exposed to the best and worst examples. It is not our intention to debate whether the worst examples still have their place. We do argue, however, that ‘good’ newsjacking is an effective and efficient method for building brand affect, and that the willing marketer can follow the attributes presented here, to steer their efforts in the right direction of success—although we acknowledge that far more research is required in this area.
We conclude by drawing similarities between the properties of a successful newsjacking advertisement and a very good joke. Both should involve content (i.e. news) that interests people, delivered at the optimal time, which makes sense (i.e. is a good fit) for the deliverer to tell, the receiver to hear, and requires the latter to possess the ability to understand and decode its underlying message. It also helps if it is funny!
References
1 Berger, J. (2013), Contagious: How to build word of mouth in the digital age, London: Simon & Schuster.
2 In some countries, seeing a monkey in a garden is the equivalent of seeing a bird or squirrel in terms of novelty.
3 Petty, R.E., & Cacioppo, J.T. (1986), The elaboration likelihood model of persuasion, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19(C), 123–205.
4 Fish and chips were traditionally wrapped in newspaper. Albeit far from hygienic, the phrase is still widely used.
5 Scott, D.M. (2011), Newsjacking: How to inject your ideas into a breaking news story and generate tons of media coverage, Chichester, UK: Wiley.
6 Choi, S.M., Lee, W.-N., & Kim, H.-J. (2005), Lessons from the rich and famous: A cross-cultural comparison of celebrity endorsement in advertising, Journal of Advertising, 34(2), 85–98.
7 Tripp, C., Jensen, T.D., & Carlson, L. (1994), The effects of multiple product endorsements by celebrities on consumers’ attitudes and intentions, Journal of Consumer Research, 20(4), 535–547.
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8 Olson, E.L., & Thjømøe, H.M. (2011), Explaining and articulating the fit construct in sponsorship, Journal of Advertising, 40(1), 57–70.
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16 Bruner, G.C., Hensel, P.J., & James, K.E. (2009), Marketing scales handbook, Chicago, IL: American Marketing Association. Scale number 483.
17 Hair, J.F., Black, W.C., Babin, B.J., Anderson, R.E., & Tatham, R.L. (2010). Multivariate data analysis (7th Edition). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
18 Hair et al., op. cit.
19 Williams, L.J., Vandenberg, R.J., & Edwards, J.R. (2009), Structural equation modeling in management research: A guide for improved analysis, The Academy of Management Annals, 3(1), 543–604.
20 The mean score difference suggests that respondents in the ‘able’ group were .29-points on the five-point Likert scale higher than the ‘unable’ group, for product involvement.