The Newspaper's Story - about GDAs

Lindsay Farrar, Ad Planning Manager, Mirror Group

Lindsay Farrar For generations the Daily Mirror has been associated with reporting and campaigning on issues which matter to society, successfully connecting with millions of readers every day.

With 85% of readers[1] being in the C1/C2/D/E social groups, the paper can rightly lay claim to being able to take the public's pulse on issues that really matter to them.

Through its own reader surveys over half[2] of readers stated that they wanted to eat more healthily this year. Consequently, the Mirror entered into a commercial partnership with the Food and Drink Federation in educating readers to make sensible, practical and relevant choices.

To engage Mirror readers, the GDA team built an integrated campaign in print and online following the format of our established Your Life section in the Mirror.

Mirror advert The campaign under the banner 'Your Food' provided concentrated, engaging, useful and inspiring articles, features and advertisements over a 13-week period. Using what they knew to be our readers' favourite meals and major health concerns they were able to focus the creative message to best effect and weave in relevant GDA facts.

Alison Phillips, Associate Editor of the Daily Mirror said "Trying to give their families a balanced, healthy diet on a realistic budget is a massive issue for Daily Mirror readers. What we wanted to achieve with Your Food was to give our readers the tools to make sensible, practical – and most of all personal – choices about how they can live more healthily."

This approach generated some of the best campaign results Mirror Group has seen. 95% of readers were aware of the GDA labelling scheme and 83% understood how to use them – a shift of 15%.

	Before	After	+/-
Awareness of term GDA	76%	83%	+9%
Understanding of term GDA	72%	83%	+15%
Awareness of GDA label	91%	95%	+4%
Use of GDA label	55%	74%	+35%
Quite/very easy to understand	84%	92%	+10%
Quite/very useful information on the label	79%	83%	+5%
Can get the information quite/very quickly	82%	88%	+7%
Would like to see labels on more products	84%	88%	+5%

The Daily Mirror Nutritionist, Angela Dowden (writer of 'Your Food') said “People need to know they can eat some of the foods they enjoy but still have a balanced diet: clear labelling helps them do that more easily.”

The results of this campaign go some way to proving that food labelling is now mass-market news. The team that worked on this project hopes that this editorial platform can continue to provide the right environment for other food clients.

About Lindsay:

Lindsay Farrar is the Ad Planning manager at Mirror Group and has responsibility for all advertiser-facing research projects. Lindsay also runs the 5000-strong reader panel.

Before joining the Mirror in 2006, she was at CBS Outdoor (formerly Viacom). Mirror Group's reader panel is used for campaign evaluation and to generate insight into readers' views on a range of subjects.