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Making fun of a quirky phone number with a mind-sticking jingle turned into The Indianapolis Star's most visible -- and audible -- marketing campaign in its 100-year history.

The 444-4444 (four, four, four, forty-four, forty-four) radio ad campaign produced results.

Since the launch in May 2001, touting the newspaper's classified advertising, calls to the classified department have increased more than 100 percent and readership of the classified section has increased 40 percent, said Brian Priester, vice president of market development for The Star.

"It's kind of taken on a life of its own," he said. "With marketing, I think newspapers are slowly becoming more aggressive."

They have to, he says, to hold their own against ever-growing competition from other media.

For The Star, major marketing of itself is a fairly new concept.

"It's pretty much unplowed ground," Priester said.

In the late 1990s, the newspaper launched a campaign called Knowledge [is] power. Before that, The Star ran television ads for the classified department.

None had the impact of 444-4444.

That success was followed by the launch of another marketing push in the fall of 2002, called "See What Happens," a branding campaign for The Star.

Both are the work of Indianapolis advertising agency Young & Laramore, also known for their creative campaigns for Steak n Shake and Goodwill.

The goal of "See What Happens" is to promote the newspaper on several levels, said Tom Denari, executive vice president of Young & Laramore.

That includes the paper's role as the community's information provider, as an institution that affects the community by taking on controversial stories that bring change, and as a source of practical information for individual readers, he said.

"We really wanted to show what happens from a variety of angles when you read The Star," he said.

The campaign has involved television ads with voiceovers of editors and reporters telling what their jobs mean to them, as well as daily morning radio ads filling readers in on what's in The Star that day.

Average daily readership of the newspaper has risen 4.6 percent, to 491,652, since the campaign's launch.

Call Star reporter Dana Knight at 1-317-444-6012.

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