On 10 September 2012, the Weekday Herald changed to a more compact tabloid size, in conjunction with a content and design refresh. The change was extremely bold and not without risks.

The move to a compact format could have potentially reinforced an existing perception that the NZH was becoming more tabloid-like in content – delivering gossip, sensationalism and scandalous news.

We needed to communicate the change, whilst avoiding reinforcing perceptions of tabloidization. Our challenge was to make people feel positive about the paper rather than giving them a reason to stop buying.

We identified the need to create a new brand positioning for the Herald. A positioning that would showcase the benefit that information and knowledge have. It needed to be credible and hark back to the halcyon days of the paper when it was not being accused of being tabloid-like.

In order to not only maintain but increase sales we developed an integrated direct response campaign which included PR, TV, Outdoor, Radio, Online, Subscriber Acquisition and Cross-sell activity to build pre-launch anticipation and post-launch conversion.

Sales increased by a whopping 28% on launch day and have since achieved an average growth of 3% on pre-launch trends.

This commercial uses a 150 million dollar printing press as an animation playback device. We printed 5000 frames of animation on to a 1 ton roll of newspaper and played it back like a gigantic flip book.

The challenge with filming a printing press is that it's just a continually running piece of paper - unlike a film projector that pauses momentarily to expose frames.

To overcome this we created a new one-off piece of electronic hardware that was running its own proprietary code. This hardware plugs directly into a Scarlet RED camera and overrides it's internal frame timing giving us full control over the camera.

It works by firing out a beam of infrared light that detects sync marks printed on each frame of animation going past, and in turn, controls the shutter of the camera. The end result is a technical world first and animation story seen in a new way.

We used the machine that's usually used to print the stories, to tell the story