'Sun-Times' Ad Campaign Is Blast From Past

By: Mark Fitzgerald "The Bright One" is back in Chicago.

Reviving its most successful image campaign ever after an absence of more than two decades, the Chicago Sun-Times will begin once more pitching itself as "The Bright One." The new campaign launches on Monday with a blitz of print, radio and outdoor advertisements.

Publisher John Cruickshank said the ad campaign was "the beginning of a pretty major push in terms of bragging a little bit about what we've done with the paper." In recent years at the Sun-Times, marketing has been less of a priority as the economy turned south just as the paper was struggling with initial reproduction problems from its new offset color presses. Cost considerations forced it to roll out a redesign in stages rather than in a showy relaunch.

The pieces are now in place, Cruickshank said. "It's been building. We had to burn in the new presses to make sure we could make deadlines and satisfy service requirements. With the redesign we now feel we're getting the right kind of message with the front page, and the economy is improving ... We're seeing a turnaround in advertising that suggests the end of the worst is over and the beginning of the best is coming."

Cruickshank said after that long period of cost containment, the coming year would see "revitalization" of the newsroom, sales and marketing departments. Asked about contests and other promotions, he said, "We'll be rolling out stuff like that over the year."

The tabloid first styled itself as "The Bright One" during the 1970s when it was owned by the Field family. The tagline was dropped as it went through a succession of owners from Rupert Murdoch to Conrad Black.

"When I first came here I found all these tchotchkes with (the slogan) on them," Cruickshank said. "(Editor in Chief Michael) Cooke and I saw it very early on and thought, hmm, what a neat idea: It's not only that people should look at the paper in terms of it's bright, the content is bright and the personalities are bright, but also in terms of looking into things, shedding light on things."

"We're a paper that's built on personality, and 'The Bright One' says that," said the campaign's creator, Jaclene Tetzlaff, the paper's vice president of marketing. "While the line has some heritage, it also immediately conveys that the paper is smart, contemporary and in-touch with the community."

The new campaign, which was produced in-house, features direct quotes from "real Chicagoans" about why they read the paper, the Sun-Times said. In addition to house ads in the paper, radio spots will run on local stations including WBBM, WXRT, WCKG, WUSN, WTMX, WVAZ, WNUA, WGCI, WLIT, and ESPN, the paper said. An outdoor campaign will appear on buses, billboards and trains, the paper added.