The Economist is looking beyond traffic to measure the success of its brand marketing push

By Alexander Lee • March 28, 2025 •

This article is part of Digiday’s coverage of its Digiday Publishing Summit. More from the series →

A year into its first brand marketing campaign in over a decade, The Economist’s traffic numbers have seen high highs and low lows. To measure the success of the campaign, the company is prioritizing other metrics, such as brand lift and awareness.

In January 2024, The Economist kicked off its first brand marketing campaign in over 15 years. Growing the publication’s web traffic was never the goal of the campaign, according to Nada Arnot, the company’s evp of marketing, who spoke at this week’s Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado. Instead, the purpose of the campaign was to help shift The Economist’s readership from an elite audience to a more democratic and accessible one, as well as to re-introduce the 181-year-old media brand to younger, more digitally native readers.

“Nowhere in our brand messaging did we say, ‘go to Economist.com to learn more,’ because that’s not a true brand campaign, right? That’s much more of a DR [direct response] campaign,” Arnot said. “And so we didn’t put a traffic metric against it. We did monitor traffic, don’t get me wrong — but what we’re seeing, and strategically, what we really want, is for more people to go to our app, anyways. So, tracking traffic to the website is a little bit of a red herring.”

Just over a year into The Economist’s brand marketing campaign, Arnot said that the company has recently experienced “quite a bit of volatility” in its web traffic, with The Economist seeing its “highest traffic in years,” but also its “lowest traffic in years,” over the past 12 months, although Arnot declined to share specific figures.

“I think that’s down to, potentially, the brand campaign, but also the news cycle,” she said. “And what we’re noticing is that the news cycle drives a ton of interest, which is great, but then people want to turn off the news; they’ve just had enough. And it’s interesting to see it happen, because it doesn’t just happen on the web — it also happens on our app, as well.”

Fluctuating traffic notwithstanding, The Economist’s brand marketing campaign, as well as a light visual brand refresh that came alongside it, has paid off, based on the metrics The Economist is tracking. In London and New York City — two geographic markets that The Economist is specifically targeting in its brand push — the publication has respectively experienced a 10-percentage-point and 5-percentage-point increase in brand recognition in the past year, as well as a 10-point increase in validated familiarity in both cities, according to Arnot.

“The reason why that’s really important is because that means that not only did people see and understand the brand campaign, they understood what it meant, in terms of who we are and what we stand for as a brand,” Arnot said.

Arnot noted that The Economist’s traffic spiked significantly following its endorsement of Kamala Harris in October 2024, although she did not provide specific numbers. Although the endorsement was not directly related to The Economist’s ongoing brand marketing campaign, she said that the publication had used the endorsement moment as the focal point of a PR and marketing push.

During the 2024 election cycle, publications such as The Guardian and The Philadelphia Inquirer experienced both a traffic spike and an influx of donations and subscriptions after endorsing Kamala Harris. On the other hand, publications such as The Washington Post and the LA Times saw thousands of subscribers jump ship after they declined to endorse a presidential candidate in 2024.

“We were, if not the last, close to the last publication to do an endorsement,” Arnot said. “We’ve done endorsements in the past, so this wasn’t new for us — but we took our time to release it.”

The Economist is looking beyond traffic to measure the success of its brand marketing push

One year into The Economist’s brand marketing push, the company is prioritizing metrics such as brand lift and awareness over traffic.