To achieve national publicity for the "AOL Arena" sponsoring activity (renaming the stadium).To communicate sponsoring commitment beyond the limits of the target group, largely comprising football fans.To boost the AOL brand as a real live, innovative enterprise.To reinforce public awareness and the AOL Internet company's relevance in the "real world". On the occasion of renaming the Hamburger Volksparkstadion (football stadium) "AOL Arena" and besides classical advertising measures and intensive PR activities - the front page of the 4 August 2001 issue of “Die Welt" was dyed a shade of cyan, well known among the public at large as the signature of the AOL (Germany) brand.A small ad on the cover directed its readers to the special, four-page supplement on sports sponsoring, which likewise appeared in cyan.This special supplement provided the background information to the campaign: since 1 July 2001, Hamburg's football stadium, the home ground of the traditional Hamburger SV club, has been renamed "AOL Arena" a fact that was publicised on this occasion to mark the first match of the German football league season 2001/2002. Alongside the more classical media measures, AOL (Germany) also avails itself of selective, innovative media solutions in its efforts to generate an optimum communications performance. This is part of the media strategy.AOL's former media agency, "Mediacom" had the original idea of printing a newspaper on cyan coloured paper, the distinguishing feature of the AOL brand."The blue newspaper Die Welt" is the direct result of subsequent deliberations between the AOL branding team and Axel Springer Verlag, the printing press. The blue newspaper "Die Welt" is a completely novel, absolutely individual media concept.

"Die Welt" is one of Germany's biggest and most highly reputed, opinion-forming, daily national newspapers with 827,000* readers throughout Germany.In Germany, it was the first time that an advertiser, a national newspaper, switched its familiar monochrome image for a different colour."The blue newspaper Die Welt" succeeded in creating a completely novel media event with exceptional awareness-triggering potential. Thanks to its unusual colouring, "Die Welt" immediately caught the eye of everyone passing newspaper stands that day.The printing press was pleased there was a leap in circulation of about 50,000 copies that day.For a solitary action of this kind, "the blue newspaper Die Welt" attracted an exceptional degree of attention for this advertising campaign and for AOL.Overnight, this campaign became a national topic of conversation and got an extremely good media resonance in print and TV, such as PR coverage of this "sensational event" throughout all the major printing press competitors while topping the themes covered by German newsreels. Even Germany’s leading TV-Channel, ARD, marked the event positively with a four-minute bulletin in the "Tagesthemen".*Source: ANA 2001

Alongside the more classical media measures, AOL (Germany) also avails itself of selective, innovative media solutions in its efforts to generate an optimum communications performance. This is part of the media strategy.AOL's former media agency, "Mediacom" had the original idea of printing a newspaper on cyan coloured paper, the distinguishing feature of the AOL brand."The blue newspaper Die Welt" is the direct result of subsequent deliberations between the AOL branding team and Axel Springer Verlag, the printing press.