Content Marketing Today

Dawn Donut: An Unrepeatable Print Advertising Success Story

Why the Internet takes the wind out of print advertising sails–and sales.

Dawn’s high impact print advertising in the 1970s and 80s can be done much better on the web in a 21st-century. I believe this change is a sad metaphor for the likely future of much of the trade publishing universe.

Back in the late 1970s, Dawn was a small regional manufacturer of doughnut mix and of mixers.  My then colleague, Bill Donohue, convinced this small regional company to invest more dollars in advertising they or any other competitor was spending with our publication, Bakery Magazine. Using research that had originally been published in the Harvard Business Review, Bill convinced the owners and that a very large targeted investment in print advertising in our magazine would pay off measurably in terms of increased sales, customers, and share of market.

Dawn became a believer.  They expanded their advertising from infrequent one third page ads to 4, 8, and even 16 pages of consecutive full-page ads.  They did this consistently for years.  The payoff was dramatic.  They grew from a small regional company with sales and the low millions to the Dawn Foods of today with sales in the billions around the world. There was an absolutely direct correlation between their high-impact advertising strategy and their growth.  We know that because they changed nothing else in their sales and marketing mix except their advertising strategy.

As a colleague of Bill’s, I was able to leverage the Dawn success story to generate similar programs with comparable levels of success.

The message to our customers was simple: focused, high impact print advertising will payoff on the bottom line and we can prove it.

That was then.  This is now–the age of the Internet.

Once again, with Dawn Foods as the example, we can observe how they are currently leveraging the Internet effectively in much the same way as they had done with print advertising in the 1970s and 80s. 

If you use the Internet Wayback machine to look at their web presence 10 years ago, you can see that they were not then taking the Internet very seriously.  They had a web presence but it appears to have been little more than a brochure site. Moreover, it was mostly about Dawn rather than being abouta customer.

If you examine the Dawn web presence today, you will see that they are taking full advantage of the power of the Internet to establish a three-dimensional presence for their customers.  Their approach is very much customer centric.  They provide lots of tools to help their baker customers be successful.  It is a rich, visually appealing website with tons of content.  In fact the new Dawn Foods website is an excellent example of the power of content marketing. And unlike their website of long ago,today it is all about the customer–and helping them succeed.

Although they maintain a presence in various bakery magazines, their most powerful marketing weapon is their website which reaches out globally with relevant, valuable content for their customers.  They can communicate much more via the web then they could communicate even with multipage ads such as those that ran in the 1970s and 80s.

I may be wrong.  But I doubt that if Dawn were beginning today that they would believe that a multi-page print advertising presence would deliver the results that they are no doubt achieving with their excellent website.  Moreover, in today’s dollars, they would probably be paying $500,000 or more per year to maintain their old level of print advertising. And, although their website may have been expensive to build, maintaining it most certainly cost substantially less than that $500,000.

Thinking well beyond Dawn, I doubt that the kind of bottom-line effective business-to-business print advertising can be replicated today–that is, in print.  On the other hand, I am absolutely confident that it can be replicated–and even improved upon–on the Web.