Launching Canberra Playbook

The brief

Take the format that made POLITICO essential reading in Washington, Brussels and London - the daily Playbook - and land it in Canberra. Not as a general political news product, but aimed squarely at the people who actually make Australian law: parliamentarians, their advisers and the staff around them.

My role

I'm the marketing lead on this launch and I run it end to end. I wrote the go-to-market plan - the audience segmentation, the channel mix, the lifecycle email journeys, the budget and the measurement framework - and I'm the one deploying it: the house ads, the cross-newsletter markers, the paid social, the email journeys, the landing page, the merch and the launch events. I have a team helping me execute some of the motions, but I'm doing most of them myself.

I wrote the campaign copy and I designed the logo and the identity - the mood board, the colour system, and the modernist crest that became the masthead. Short of writing the newsletter itself, which my colleagues in the newsroom do, this is mine.

An identity built for the place

The launch needed to feel Australian without falling back on cliché. The system is built on a collage of Parliament House - the flagmast, the forecourt, the curved facade - set against a gold sun and the green of the flag, with POLITICO red holding the masthead. Editorial in tone, unmistakably Canberra.

The product

A weekday morning briefing: Driving the Day, the big picture, what to expect and what to watch - built to be read before the first meeting.

The campaign

The positioning was competitive and a little cheeky, written for an audience that already reads too many newsletters: First think in the morning. Six parties, one newsletter. Delete your other newsletters - one read instead of twenty. Your rivals read POLITICO. We don't take sides. We take notes. Insiders on no one's side.

It ran as a full system rather than a single asset: a dedicated landing page, paid search, sponsored LinkedIn, organic social, on-site banners, email signatures across the bureau, transit out-of-home in Canberra, and merch built to circulate inside Parliament House.

Launch

Launch was anchored by events in Canberra - a reception, a live recording and a series of closed-door dinners bringing the bureau together with the audience it was built for.

An agent that turns a mention into a subscriber

The most useful thing I built for this launch isn't a creative asset. It's an agent that runs every morning.

It reads the day's edition, pulls out every person named in it, and runs those names against our subscriber database. From there it splits:

• Already a subscriber? It drafts and sends them a note letting them know they were mentioned that morning, and thanking them for reading.
• Not a subscriber? Their mention becomes the hook. The same fact - you were in Canberra Playbook today - turns into a reason to sign up and see it.

It's a small piece of automation doing something that would otherwise be nobody's job: turning the newsletter's own coverage into a daily, personalised acquisition and retention loop, in a city where being mentioned is the currency.

The result