Newspapers are rather ambiguous. You buy one without really knowing what’s inside it

beyond the front-page story. It was this media insight that provided us with the perfect

canvas to tell the story of GEM. We interrogated The Herald’s editors and extracted every

fact possible about their 45472nd edition. Taking art direction cues from the newspaper

itself, we displayed these facts as headlines and made them front and back page news.

And to keep things interesting, while still staying true to the front and back page, we used

the newspaper’s classified section to insert some facts of our own (there was even a wanted

ad for a flux capacitor).

We used the medium of a newspaper, and made it our message.

On Tuesday 9th April, 2013, all 870,000 readers of The Herald received a newspaper that told

them exactly what they were paying for, before they even turned the first page. They say you

should never let the facts get in the way of a good story, but on that day, the facts were the

story.

Traffic to Mercury Energy’s website rose sharply, with GEM registrations significantly

increasing. We can’t speak for other national news websites, but we suspect we stole their

thunder, on a day when all eyes should have been on them and the iron lady.