The Guardian
retelling a fairytale
Capabilities:
By 2012, the traditional newspaper industry was already in tatters. Twitter was becoming the go-to platform for eyewitness accounts. Add to that the obsolescence of print and the long-term diagnosis looked terminal.
This is the story of how we kept the wolf from the door by bringing a classic fairytale and a newspaper into the 21st century — and gained The Guardian millions of new readers.
3M
New readers
19%
Increase in online readers
100m
Twitter impressions
The people we wanted to read The Guardian thought of it as dusty and conventional. To get with the times, this perception had to change.
An epic product demo.
Traditional newspaper journalism was headed towards extinction. From its ashes had risen a digital-first news-gathering service — one which encouraged contributions, challenges and points of view from everyone, everywhere. The Guardian called it Open Journalism. We called it The Whole Picture, a strapline resurrected from their classic 1986 Points of View ad.
In the ad Three Little Pigs, we retold the classic children’s fairytale by imagining how the modern media would cover it. Playing out like a docudrama, the 2-minute film begins with SWAT police storming the porkers' house. News of the arrests spreads. Opinion frenzy swells. Investigative journalists seek out the truth, culminating in mass protests for reform –– all covered, of course, by The Guardian.
The campaign also played out across print, in a series of minimalist posters that showed how many people contribute to a single news story.
All in all, the campaign was seen in over 200 countries, even making headlines down under. That same year, The Guardian was named the number 1 quality news brand in the UK for the first time.