Description:

Journalism in Aotearoa has been hit hard over the last 12 months. A dramatic decline in advertising revenue for local media, along with major funding cuts, has led to industry-wide redundancies and the closure of legacy organisations.

The Spinoff, one of the country’s leading digital publishers, has felt the impact deeply, enduring its worst financial quarter since the business was founded. With no lifelines left, The Spinoff turned to its audience to protect the platform. Aiming to shift to a subscription-led model by the end of 2025, we needed to convince their audience that The Spinoff was not only worth paying for, but worth saving.

‘Find Your Corner of The Spinoff’ is a membership drive that turns our audience's content preference data into reasons to become paying subscribers.

Using on-site analytics, we mapped The Spinoff’s most popular topics and formats to a set of unique scales we call ‘content compasses’ - a simple yet powerful graphic device for celebrating what people love most about The Spinoff, with each axis showcasing a different corner of journalistic coverage.

Then, through a short digital survey, we invited our audience to reflect on where they stood - reminding themselves of the content they love and should support if they want it to continue. These findings became a nationwide campaign, turning real readers, listeners, and watchers into advocates for independent journalism.

At the heart of the campaign is a responsive design system where every layout, in every media placement, is dictated by data. On the backend, the system correlates survey results against media specs to define visual areas within the compasses - allowing us to spotlight an individual content preference or present a broader community snapshot.

While complex to build, the final visual output champions clarity. Simple block colours drawn from The Spinoff’s brand palette form the base for contrasting black compasses and typography. Simplicity also guided our photography with a stripped-back studio setting capturing the real essence of The Spinoff audience.

With The Spinoff on the brink of closure, this innovative campaign and design system needed to deliver one vital metric - an increase in subscribers. With a 48% rise in paying members (and counting), our campaign not only met that goal - it’s exceeding it.

That surge in support has had a direct, tangible impact: protecting newsroom jobs, sustaining vital independent reporting, and securing a more stable future for one of Aotearoa’s most respected digital publishers.