We had to make a newspaper ad for a series of longreads in which 4 contemporary thinkers put the digital revolution in a broader perspective. But... talking about technological change and the digital revolution in old medium as a newspaper? It seemed a contradiction - but it isn't. Because the impact, meaning and consequences of the digital revolution go far beyond media or technology. This thought was our starting point. So we made an ad and added the latest technological ‘tricks'. Each ad showed a drawn portrait of an interviewee. When you scanned the drawing (via Shazam image recognition), you discovered that the drawing was made by a robot. The voice over said: "You just scanned the first newspaper ad drawn by a robot. Nice. But to fully understand the digital revolution, one must look further than technological gizmos. Read all about it in our new series."

BRAND RELEVANCE

De Tijd is Belgium's leading business newspaper, the reference for all economical and financial news. But the newspaper has changed its positioning towards a qualitative business oriented news medium. Their new baseline: Always ahead.

Our ads had:

- to generate awareness and interest in the new series of longreads on technological progress amongst current De Tijd readers

- to support the newspaper's broader positioning

- to underline the qualitative value of De Tijd newspaper. ('Always ahead')

We made a series of 4 newspaper ads. Each ad depicted a portrait of one of the 4 interviewees: Douglas Coupland (writer and visual artist) Luciano Floridi (‘the philosopher of Google’), Geneviève Bell (anthropologist at Intel) and Lord Robert Skidelsky (economist).

PROCESS & IMPLEMENTATION

Because the series were all about progress, we added the latest technological ‘tricks' to classic newspaper ads.

We teamed up with the French artist and scientist Patrick Tresset. He developed a robot called 'Paul' who drew portraits of each interviewee. (The drawings have a hand made feel, so it is more surprising to find out they were made by a robot.)

These drawn portraits were the core visual of each ad. Each portrait could be scanned via Shazam visual recognition, an at that time brand new technique. When you scanned the portrait, you saw a film of Paul the robot who is drawing the portrait you just scanned.

Note: for the people without Shazam, we added a body copy.

The ads positioned De Tijd as a newspaper that looks beyond economical and financial news. Furthermore, the campaign underlined the new baseline 'Always ahead'.

Nice side effect: during the 4 weeks the series ran De Tijd registered an uplift in sales of 7,5% compared to a month earlier. The ads generated over 10.000 views, not bad for a newspaper with daily sales of 1963 copies.