Background

The Bub Hub is a parenting website set up by Brad and Hilary Lauder in 2001 after the birth of their first child. Since then, it has grown to be the most widely used online pregnancy and parenting portal in the country with over 150,000 unique visitors, 420,000 visits and a mind-blowing 50 million page hits each month.  Their newsletter alone goes out to over 27,000 people a month!

The only parenting website to be endorsed by the Australian College of Midwives (ACMI) and Playgroup Australia, it also supports and has links to the Australian Breastfeeding Association and the Australian Lactation Consultants Association. As one of the leading parenting magazines says of BubHub, it is "An indispensable parenting resource. Try it and you'll soon see why."

Driven by a passion to create a central resource to help Australian parents and parents-to-be make informed choices about their pregnancy, Bub Hub is now a huge directory that includes sections such as: the first parents job network, forums, a section on family travel with advice and links to specialist travel information, pram and nappy reviews (by parents), links to over 10,000 retailers, an online swim school run by Laurie Lawrence and much more.

Publicity Campaign

Our brief from Brad and Hilary was to try and generate media coverage outside of the parenting sector, as they felt that they needed to create greater awareness outside of their core market. They wanted stories in business media and metro newspapers as well as women’s magazines. Our strategy was to focus on the newsworthy sections within the website and feed different stories every month to the media.

This was a huge success and they even got a full page in The Australian Financial Review, four pages in Notebook and much more. Initially a little skeptical, Brad is now a huge convert to publicity where he feels he gets a great return on his investment.