Insurance giant Cigna said on Monday it tapped Dow Jones
for a cross-media marketing campaign explaining financial benefits issues to corporate decision-makers and employees.
The campaign, called “The Benefits of Planning,” will use a variety of Dow Jones assets as platforms for discussing financial planning for retirement, leveraging Dow Jones’ popularity with high-level executives who make benefits decisions at companies. Cigna offers a number of retirement products.
“It was just as imp to raise awareness that they were in the retirement-benefits game and a highly credible player there,” said Matthew Goldberg, director of market strategies at The Wall Street Journal. “This program is unique in that it targets both employees and employers.”
The promotion begins this month and is slated to run through November 2004. Financial details were not disclosed.
Using Dow Jones research, Cigna will publish advertorials on the complexities of planning for retirement, as well as new developments in the field, in Dow Jones’ flagship, The Wall Street Journal. The advertorials will also appear in Barron’s and SmartMoney.
While the print advertorials will reach the corporate decision-maker, Dow Jones will tap into the Web to reach a consumer audience. The Web sites of the Journal and SmartMoney will power an informational Web site by Cigna, offering both content and tools related to retirement. The site explores such topics as valuing a 401(k) and figuring out the right asset allocation. The Benefits of Planning” site includes related stories that ran in The Wall Street Journal Online. All print advertisements will direct readers to the site for further information, and SmartMoney.com will carry online ads for the site.
Other aspects of the campaign include a TV spot to run on Dow Jones partner CNBC and a radio spot on The Wall Street Journal Radio Network. Dow Jones and Cigna will jointly produce a series of roundtable discussions with benefits experts, as well as distribute a white paper based on Dow Jones research. Some runs of SmartMoney will include cover-wraps from Cigna.
The integrated marketing campaign is the first fruit from Dow Jones’ effort to package together marketing campaigns using its array of media properties. Teh company recently set up an integrated solutions group to promote such deals.
“What we’re trying to do at Dow Jones is leverage our assets and focus on delivering an affluent audience,” said Jim Donoghue, vice president of developement at The Wall Street Journal.
The ING campaign is similar to one AOL began in May for Dutch investment bank ING to promote its personal finance site, Money Mentor. The three-year promotion, however, strictly targeted consumers with what it called “edutainment,” drawing on CNNMoney.com content and entertainment assets from AOL Time Warner. The AOL-ING pact included a variety of entertainment content from the likes of The Green Lantern and Chariots of Fire that sought to make dry personal finance information interesting to the average consumer.
