The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has always done a lot of traditional advertising. I remember seeing their commercials on TV when I was growing up. With renewed focus on the LDS church due in part to Mitt Romney’s Presidential bid, the church is aiming to clear up misconceptions.
From Deseret Morning News:
The new print ad campaign features people who identify themselves and their quest to find God, describing a life challenge that sent them looking for meaning in the divine. “I felt so destroyed by my addiction to alcohol and drugs,” writes Jovanny Vasquez, of Bronx, N.Y., in a two-page ad that appeared in U.S. News in the Las Vegas area in August.
Appearing alongside the image of a man dancing with a woman and two children, he continues, “I prayed with all my heart to find a solution to my life. I was at the point of losing my wife and family. The God I was looking for was a merciful God. I wanted to know how to be forgiven.”
At the bottom of the page, the church’s logo appears in large lettering, with the phrase TRUTH RESTORED underneath in smaller type, followed by mormon.org beneath them both.
The campaign, which has adopted a slightly different format for TV, radio, billboard and Internet advertising, has been running for about eight months in four different areas of the country that correspond to designated LDS mission areas: Las Vegas; Las Vegas West; Independence, Mo., including Kansas City and Wichita; and New York Utica, which includes Albany, Syracuse and Utica.
But it’s not merely a matter of spreading the word. There’s ROI here, too, as Scott Swofford, director of media for the LDS Missionary Department, says of early campaign testing:
He said eight months “is a pretty short time to decide whether the campaign is working,” but the team will continue to analyze data on how it affected people who actually joined the church. “What we do know is that traffic to mormon.org increased from 200 to 300 percent from pretest levels. Of the referrals coming in, many of them are from that site, but we don’t have specific numbers yet that say things have improved or changed.
“Whether the net result will be an increase in baptisms — we’re still trying to figure out where that is.”
