Die Welt Kompakt's Interesting Marketing Campaign

One of my favourite sociological blogs is Sociological Images, which analyses images (from sociological studies as well as from everyday media and popular culture) in sociological context.

I guess I am an influenced grouppie, and my homage to this blog is my analysis of Die Welt Kompakt's new advertising campaign.

I will start with an instroduction about this newspaper: Welt Kompakt is a relatively new newspaper (est. 2004), which attempts to "summarise" the more comprehensive Welt newspaper into an "underground ride" newspaper. A compact: "serious" newspaper in a "tabloid" format. Although Die Welt Kompakt's publishing house is one of largest in the world (Springer), let alone in the German language sphere, it still felt the need to sell to more readers (there is a problem with WK's readership statistics, since it is counted together with the older, more established, Welt).

Specifically, it tried to appeal to the "Online generation", the one that might read news off their iPhones/Googlephones, the one that is used to interactivity in news comsumption (and not to the relative passive stance of the traditional reading). These are some of the ads in the campaign, whose slogan is "are we mature enough (for a newspaper of our own)?"

The images tell us, of course, a bit about the social/popular culture image of this specific crowd they're after; and in a way - it also excludes those (e.g., people above a certain age, poorer or less literate people) who are beyond in the social networking digital devide


We have so many online friends, that we need a new word for the real ones



We call our moms while checking our mails



We Google the opening hours for the bakery across the street



We register our loved-ones to Facebook