The Sun’s special World Cup Pride edition fell onto the doorsteps of (almost) all 22 million UK households last week. The special 24 page edition was distributed on June 12th and was created to mark the beginning of the FIFA World Cup in Brazil.
The tabloid’s editor David Dinsmore described the move as the “greatest print initiative of recent times”. In his interview with Media Week he also praised colleague David Robinson (The Sun’s marketing director), who was said to be the brainchild of the idea. The outlandish proposal aims to showcase the importance of newspapers in capturing the heads and hearts of a nation, especially during times of shared national consciousness. Dinsmore is also hoping the nationwide door drop will prove to be a strong sampling exercise for people who have never read The Sun before. “I think there are a lot of preconceptions and misconceptions about the The Sun,” he said.
The special edition featured regular columnists writing about what England means to them, a feature on England’s biggest fan, as well as comedian James Corden’s message to England manager Roy Hodgson. Despite featuring regular columnists, not everything about the content of the Sun was of typical fare with the paper opting not to use topless models on page three. Despite this drop, the editor says the move should not be seen as a step towards removing Page 3 girls from the UK’s largest selling newspaper altogether. When Dinsmore was questioned on the subject, he said: “This is one for the readers to decide, not for those who do not buy the paper. The people who are against it, I find, almost exclusively, are people who do not buy the paper.”
The copy has been part funded by stalwart Sun advertisers, such as Sky, Aldi, Coke, BT, Mars and Domino’s. All will have hoped to benefit from the estimated reach figure of 48.3 million adults.
The Sun is not the first European newspaper to embark on a nationwide door drop, Bild in Germany completed a similar move a couple of years ago to celebrate its 60th birthday. However unlike Bild, the Sun faced strong opposition from some parts of the UK, especially parts of Merseyside, Cheshire and West Lancashire where postal staff refused to deliver free copies of the newspaper.
MEC View
This bold move is without doubt one of the biggest national press innovations to occur in recent years and it’s great to see that traditional channels can continue to innovate and surprise consumers with new ideas.
The Sun will ultimately be hoping their investment is rewarded with new readers. Evidence of whether this is the case will firstly be revealed in the June ABC figures (released next month). We will be reviewing these with great interest.