HSE to run bank holiday mental health campaign on thejournal.ie

The Health Service Executive's national office for suicide prevention is to extend its advertising partnership with Journal Media throughout 2015, with campaigns scheduled to run on bank holidays.

Journal Media's main site, thejournal.ie, ran a combination of native advertising, sponsored articles and a "wellbeing magazine" for the HSE over the Christmas period. The deal was proposed to the HSE by the media agency Carat Ireland in the wake of its launch of the "#littlethings" campaign last October.

Kahlil Thompson-Coyle, mental health campaign manager for the HSE office, said thejournal.ie was the number one source of traffic to its website, yourmentalhealth.ie, between December 24th and January 10th, generating 2,329 or 30 per cent of all sessions. This put it ahead of Google and Facebook for referrals.

Headlines that appeared on thejournal.ie over the period included “Top tips for staying connected for good mental wellbeing”, “Why getting enough sleep is vital – and how to get it” and “Why you need a ‘mindfulness minute’ in your life”.

Speaking at the IAB Connect conference on content-led digital marketing, Thompson- Coyle said that, as bank holidays were a time when people often felt vulnerable, with higher rates of self-harm and emergency department admissions, it had chosen to repeat its native advertising on thejournal.ie to coincide with those dates.

“We feel we have a moral imperative to do this for every bank holiday,” she said. “This is about building long-term relationships for the HSE, not just for the #littlethings campaign.”

Native ads are those that mimic the typical format in which the editorial content on a particular site or platform appears. They are usually labelled in some way to signify that they are advertising.

IAB Ireland, the trade association for the Irish online advertising industry, has set up a native advertising council, headed by Adrian Acosta, the chief operations officer at Journal Media.

Meanwhile, digital advertising sales company Electric Media has signed on as the sales partner for Outbrain, a New York-headquartered company that operates a content-discovery platform used by several Irish news groups including INM and The Irish Times.

Outbrain powers the “around the web” or “promoted articles” links that appear on media sites and drive traffic to other editorial and branded content.

Its managing director for Britain and Ireland, Stephanie Himoff, who also spoke at the IAB Connect event, says it has "witnessed a growing appetite for content marketing" and that hiring a sales partner will help it maximise "both the demand and opportunity" in Ireland.