I’m not sure how many of you heard of this, but this is certainly news to me and I thought it was worth sharing because I’ve been waiting for a while to see an interesting campaign come out of the MENA region and thankfully the folks at Y&R Dubai came up with a pretty engaging concept not too long ago that was nominated for a webby.
The campaign dubbed “The Headline News Cup Sleeve” was developed for Gulf news, a leading english newspaper in the UAE, took a fresh look at getting people to subscribe to the newspaper. The idea was that fresh news goes hand in hand with fresh coffee. So Gulf news teamed up with Tim Hortons and started printing headline news on the coffee sleeves in 15 of their locations, like the ones below:
The interesting part of the campaign is that tied in digital, social and mobile together, the sleeves were not preprinted and handed out to stores ahead of time, but rather printed fresh as a customer would order a coffee at the location, the news was fetched in realtime from the Gulf News Twitter feed and printed one by one using this magic red box:
You really have to appreciate the irony of the campaign, promoting the old dying print media by using the new digital media which is responsible for killing it! Disturbing I know. But you can’t argue with the results because they were impressive as published on the campaign’s site:
- Subscription’s up by 10.8% so far.
- it has been organically shared 70,345 times on Facebook
- With a small investment and no media budget, it resulted in a combined PR value of more than USD 150,000
Goes to show you that a well planned and executed multichannel campaign can be extremely effective.