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A Social Media Application

To help The Australian celebrate its 50th birthday, Native Empire developed Storyline, a new social media tool that invites Australians to explore the biggest news stories of their lifetimes. Available across mobile and desktop, the tool allows users to view the front page of the newspaper from the day they were born. Users simply insert their birthday into a field, and a 50-year timeline appears highlighting key front pages and imagery from big events. At the key events following, the tool reminds the user how old they were at the time and invites them to share their own memory from those times.

Nicholas Gray, The Australian CEO said “we’re celebrating our proud past and exciting future by releasing Storyline which showcases our wonderful archive of front pages, stories and imagery in an innovative, immersive and interactive way.”

Results

The launch of Storyline was promoted on both The Australian homepage and front page of the newspaper which reaches 3.2 million readers each month. In addition to this, Storyline was covered by media outlets including, AdNews, MuMbrella, Business Insider, INMA, Startup Smart. The early success of Storyline speaks for itself:

  • On launch day, #ausstoryline was trending on Twitter, peaking at a mention every minute during the morning of launch.
  • More than 12,000 people engaged with the tool in the first two days.
  • Users were highly engaged, with session durations 25% higher than average. Engagement on mobile and tablet was even higher.

Digital Strategy & Planning

Our team defined a strategy to use the Facebook platform to developed a concept that would help to reinforce the broader campaign message. 

Custom Application Development

Our Team developed a custom application that ingested 50 years of archived Front Pages from the Australian newspaper and made these available for inclusion in a front end timeline tool with content management system.

Design and Branding

The Team designed an innovative user interface to make it easy for people to discover a deep level of content from within the application while retaining the strong branding guidelines of the newspaper.

Device Responsive Development

The brief required a ‘mobile first’ approach to development, which the Team adopted to build a tool that works seamlessly across all devices, optimised for both desktop and mobile experiences.

Integrated Social Media Development

The application was developed to enable people to easily share their memories across Facebook and Twitter, with integrated capabilities for sharing content across social networks.