The West Australian’s Point and Pay wins international award for advertisers

The West Australian’s Point and Pay initiative won the International News Media Association (INMA) Award in the category “Marketing Solutions for Advertising Clients” (Circulation 300,000+) against competition from The New York Times.

In 2012 The West Australian transformed into a live transactional newspaper, allowing readers to buy products instantly from advertisements by scanning the page with their smartphone.

The Point and Pay service gives advertisers the opportunity to capitalise on the growth of m-commerce and innovate the way they sell to customers in a new exciting way. This new service allows local retailers to compete in the digital world and provides them with another channel to sell to the mobile consumer.

The West Australian’s General Manager West Solutions, Amanda Burton said, “Point and Pay allows advertisers to access new markets via mobile technology that directly links their press advertisement to a customer purchase. 

“While transaction levels remain relatively low, the conversion rates are quite exciting and these numbers increase exponentially when scaled and applied to more merchants and increased interval of campaigns. We look forward to introducing more retail clients to Point and Pay and enabling them to become mobile transactional in the future”, she said.

A comprehensive marketing campaign supported the launch in July 2012, including press advertising and editorial, online and TV promotion.

The launch wrap that ran in The Weekend West on July 28-29 received 1,871 QR scans from Unique Visitors (plus 193 more repeat visitors) over the weekend. When compared to a Digital metric which has an average Click Through Ratio of 0.05% the equivalent ‘click through’ from the newspaper was 1200% higher to circulation and 500% higher to readership.