Campaign hopes to make us `pick up a Penguin'

Penguin books is to initiate a £300,000 sterling brand-building advertising campaign - an unusual strategy in an industry which relies on marketing individual book or authors. The new campaign which will appear on 48 sheets and DART poster sites in Dublin, as well as similar sites in London, Manchester and Glasgow, features dramatic black-and-white archive photos with the copy line "Be There". The company tested a brand-building campaign in London last year and this campaign is more extensive in its reach and spend.

Penguin's move into brand advertising follows research last year which revealed that the Penguin brand is one of the top twenty most recognisable in the UK.

Dublin is included on the advertising roster because Ireland accounts for 10 per cent of the complete market, making it - according to Mr John Bond, marketing director for Penguin - "a market where we feel we can gain some extra leverage with the brand".

Generic advertising is uncommon in an industry which would appear to be increasingly dominated by personalities, but from a marketing point of view it makes complete sense. Mr Michael McLoughlin, an Irish book marketing and PR consultant, says that 60 per cent of book purchases are by "speculative readers" who know nothing about the book they buy but are sold on the cover or in-store promotion. Furthermore, the busiest bookshops are in airports, making impulse buyers a key audience for booksellers.

Publishers rarely advertise outside the book pages of newspapers or the trade press. Popular fiction titles, particularly those that appeal to women by well known authors such as Marion Keyes or Maeve Binchy, are sometimes advertised in women's magazines or in short burst on radio. Otherwise book marketing is dominated by below the line activities, including window displays, author tours and reviews.

The most extreme example of a successful below-the-line campaign is the most recent. Last week Bloomsbury's carefully orchestrated hype of the new Harry Potter book paid off. The strategy ranged from not releasing the actual title of the book to having stores open at midnight for the launch. Some 1,500 people alone turned up to Easons in Dublin last Friday at midnight and in the space of an hour 600 copies of the book were sold - making it an instant bestseller.