Brand Made Stories: Print Isn’t Dead. Print Is Alive. Big Time.
Hi all,
Hope you’ve been well.
Welcome to Brand Made Stories (formerly known as Friday Thing/k) – a brand storytelling canvas where I’d like to share with you smart, creative, inspiring, engaging, cool, and innovative brand stories that take my marketing breath away once a week.
The Old. I love newspapers, where stories are served on actual paper. The feeling of flipping the pages, licking your finger for each page you turn, and even the black ink it leaves on your hands.
Back in my pre-parenting days, weekends used to start with me reading all of the three main Israeli newspapers start to finish. I also remember during pre-internet days, opening the front door every morning with a bit of excitement to grab the paper and read it with the first coffee of the day.
I swear to you, coffee tastes better with a newspaper next to it.
When I started to work as a media planner (offline, even though that term didn’t exist because there wasn’t even an online), the print buyers room was my favorite spot in the office as it was packed with papers and magazines. I was like a kid (in fact I was) in a candy shop.
That’s why I take it personally every time I come across a headline that heralds, “Print is Dead.”
The New. Breaking news! Print is alive, and our good friends at Dentsu in Japan have proved it. Big Time.
Literally.
In Japan, there are a lot of people who want to purchase high-quality Audi cars but just don’t have the garage space for it. That being the case, the Audi A3 is perfect for them. At least that’s what the auto brand wanted consumers to notice. So, Dentsu decided to create a newspaper insert the size of an actual Audi A3. Yes, accurate and scaled to a 1mm – a GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS® title for the largest newspaper insert advertising, 2.77 m². Those who received the A3 insert could place it in their homes and test how it fit.
Using only a newspaper, Audi brought innovation into the home and not just its showrooms.
In addition, the print ad was turned into an AR marker people could scan with their smartphones and tablets, letting audiences create a life-size 3D image and experience the feeling of owning an A3:
So is print dead? It’s live and kickin’.
The campaign for Audi Japan, “Showroom Home Delivery” won the Bronze in Cannes 2016.
Speaking of old and new…
Spray paint brand, Krylon, was able to turn one man’s trash into another man’s treasure. Their team of DIY experts went on the world’s longest yard sale, driving 690 miles. Along the way, they bought 127 worthless items, spray painted them and made them valuable again. They then utilized Pinterest’s ‘buyable pin’ feature, putting all 127 Krylon-transformed objects up for sale at double what was paid, with all proceeds donated to charity:
Brilliant.
Now before you click away, do you want to watch the best TV promo ever?
Big call, I know, but it involves Channel 4’s Superhumans and first appeared as a promo for the London 2012 Paralympics Games, they are now back for Rio 2016 in a Broadway-style extravaganza:
Quite amazing.
See you next week.
As always, feedback is more than welcome and needed, so please leave comments below.
Additionally, if you have any brand stories in mind, I love to discover new things.
Just call me Joe.
