• by Paul Gough , September 15, 2003

Insurance and financial services provider CIGNA Monday unveiled plans for an ambitious cross-platform marketing campaign built around a surprising media partner: Dow Jones & Co. While Dow Jones & Co.'s financial news oriented content is a natural affinity for the deal, the deal is surprising because Dow Jones & Co. is largely a print and database operator.

However, the deal does use the Wall Street Journal Radio Network, The Wall Street Journal Online, SmartMoney.com and its alliance with CNBC to extend the campaign into electronic media to reach business decision makers and their employee.

Terms of the deal, which is built around a marketing program dubbed "The Benefits of Planning," weren't disclosed, but the five-quarter program kicks off this month and runs through November 2004.

James Donaghue, vice president of marketing development at The Wall Street Journal, said Monday afternoon that while some programs have been done in conjunction with other parts of Dow Jones, the CIGNA promotion is ground- breaking for the company as a whole.

"This is the first integrated solution developed in concert with the other parts of Dow Jones," said Donaghue.

Matthew Goldberg, director of marketing strategies at The Wall Street Journal, said the program came after discussions with CIGNA and the sales staff of SmartMoney, a monthly magazine on finance and investing published by The Wall Street Journal. CIGNA wanted to build awareness in some parts of their business and Goldberg said the financial services company liked the Dow Jones platforms because of their credibility and the demographic that SmartMoney reached.

About a year ago, the SmartMoney sales team developed a plan that grew to encompass not just that magazine but much of Dow Jones. Donaghue said that the plan was idea-driven and didn't force any particular Dow Jones asset into the campaign because that wouldn't serve the client.

With the deal kicking off, it's only the first of what Dow Jones hopes will be more such cross-platform deals in the focus that its properties can offer, decision-makers and affluent consumers. Donaghue said the company has developed a working group - Dow Jones Integrated Solutions - that has representatives from each of the company's units, from The Wall Street Journal to CNBC to worldwide properties like the Far Eastern Economic Review, Russian-language business newspaper Vedomosti and online services. Goldberg will lead the unit, which will not be a formally dedicated cross-platform division of Dow Jones like you might find at other media companies. But that doesn't mean that Dow Jones isn't working hard to land other opportunities, including training the sales force companywide in the process and developing a list of accounts that might be interested in it.

"Now we're proactive. We've created what we call a 'placemat' that shows the various assets that we can rely on to put together a program for a client," Donaghue said. "We're in the process of putting together presentations for agencies."

The CIGNA integrated marketing campaign is built around the issues that Dow Jones and CIGNA have identified as being crucial to the business areas where CIGNA lives and its customer base.

"We tapped into key insights in the benefits marketplace, things that thought leaders think are going to happen," said Goldberg.

Donaghue acknowledged concerns about advertorials, that they're sometimes nothing more than filler, but said that CIGNA and Dow Jones had produced quality pieces that included compelling information and performed well on tests. And to pass the "church vs. state" test, it's done by a freelance journalist.