Problem: Limited content engagement

Solution: Multi-phased, web-based promotion of food initiatives

Crafted a single campaign hub with a fresh and compelling brand story to maximize user engagement.

Chicago Tribune’s Food & Dining section includes highly-regarded restaurant reviews, sought-after seasonal recipes and authoritative cooking stories from columnists.

For years, the only content engagement was the Readers’ Choice Awards where people voted on food-related categories. That was our starting point to create an online hub for promoting multiple food initiatives throughout the year. I led the creative team, collaborated with stakeholders on digital and content strategy and provided all custom CMS development.

Deliverables & Tasks

Digital audit & market analysis, ideation workshops, user/campaign flows and journey mapping, wireframes, clickable prototyping, stakeholder presentations, custom WordPress development and development specifications

Brand

Chicago Tribune’s Food & Dining

Awards

INMA: Best Idea to Grow Digital Readership or Engagement

Role

Senior Creative Director

My Contributions
  • User Experience Design
  • User Interface Design
  • Wireframing
  • User Flows & Journey Mapping
  • User Research & Testing
  • Creative Direction
  • Visual Design
  • Custom CMS Development (WordPress)
  • HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, PHP, WordPress, SEO
01 05

Multi-phased Engagement Strategy

With the continued popularity of the Food & Dining content in previous years, it made sense to expand engagement for the web environment, newsletter and social channels. We created a 4 phase strategy to build awareness for the upcoming Chicago Tribune Food & Dining content and exclusive event.

Phase 1

Promoted the Food & Dining newsletter as a way to stay up to date on the upcoming awards.

Phase 3

Encouraged Reader’s Choice voting, sharing of content and teased details for the upcoming awards event.

Phase 2

Created awareness that our food critic, Phil Vettel, would be selecting the winners of the Critic’s Choice awards.

Phase 4

Promoted the exclusive event where local foodies can meet and try food from the Dining Awards winners.

02 05

Phase 1: The Tease

Building awareness for upcoming editorial content and awards was the goal. By building viewership early, the result was more return users to the web environment through later phases in anticipation of the awards season. We crafted a creative campaign that connected with the emotional side of experiencing and enjoying great food. The campaign consisted of 4 message variations and landing pages to help keep a fresh narrative as these would continue to run through all phases.

03 05

Phase 2 & 3: The Big Push

The full website launched during phase 2. It continued to promote users to sign up for the Food & Dining newsletter, but also aggregated a ‘best of’ collection of editorial articles. By surfacing both new and old articles, it helped to drive traffic to content that would normally be lost within the news archive. We also encouraged views of the Best Restaurants pages on our news website while creating awareness of the Critic’s Choice portion of the awards.

Phase 3 encouraged voting, which drove traffic to the website but also promoted our social channels, with nominated chefs and restaurants reposting from our pages or tagging us to raise awareness of their nominations.

04 05

Phase 4: The Awards Event

During this phase we took social engagement to the next level, with local foodies snapping selfies with their favorite chefs and using the Dining Awards hashtag. The event was another opportunity to create an onsite connection with users and the brand.

05 05

Campaign Success & Guide For Future Initiatives

In three months, the company acquired 4,405 new emails for the Food & Dining newsletter. While promoting our food critic, his Best Restaurants page received over 84K views—up from 14k four weeks prior. During voting, 95 social posts from award nominees with Chicago Tribune social handles tagged reached over a million people and 30,000 votes were cast. When the award winners were announced, the story page received 40,268 views within two days. The Dining Awards event had 480 attendees, with 75 social video shares, 1,418 snapchat filter views, and over 140k+ local food enthusiasts reached by influential attendees.

With the success of this campaign, the Dining Awards became the template for other similar initiatives throughout Chicago Tribune and has also led to an increase in food-related events.

4,405

New Emails Collected

30K

Votes Were Cast

1.2M+

Views in 3 Months