The Independent has been going out of its way to promote itself as
the political newspaper during the party conference season and has
continued to do so despite attempts by Conservative Central Office to
put a spanner in the PR works at this week’s party conference in
Blackpool.
The broadsheet’s promotional drive until now involved giving free copies
of the paper away at both Labour and Liberal Democrat conferences and
sticking plastic banners with its logo on newsagent shop fronts in
Bournemouth last week.
In a surfeit of PR initiative, the Indie even co-produced both the daily
Labour conference newspaper and a design supplement to coincide with the
Design Council’s fringe meeting last week.
But the Conservatives refused to let the Independent hand out free
copies this week. Not to be deterred, the paper’s marketing head, Duncan
Eaton, decided to exhibit at the Tory conference instead and make free
copies of the paper available at the exhibition stand.
’Politics is at the core of the paper, so it seemed to make sense to
market ourselves as aggressively as possible,’ he says. ’To underline
the independence of the title, we’re not favouring one party over the
other.’
Now that’s PR perseverance for you.
