We had two important touch points - 1. The morning newspaper period. 2. The time spent on the net in the office. Both these were taken care of with the mouse pad. One, the consumer found the mouse pad instead of the newspaper in the morning. Second, he used the mouse pad in the office. Thus, we used the idea to drive across the message that we were now available online.

The first goal was to make newspaper readers aware that a web edition of the newspaper is now available online. The second goal was to actually get them to visit the site and use the new convenience.

We covered 3 neighbourhoods and over 800 homes. The result was more than 2000 hits in the first half of the day. The reason – the mouse pads created word-of-mouth communication as well.

The medium was a mouse pad. The message on it was to log on to the internet to access the online edition of the newspaper. These two worked together to give the consumer a medium that he couldn’t ignore. One that he found outside his doorstep (instead of the newspaper). One that he would carry with him and use in the workplace. One that would constantly remind him that the newspaper can be accessed online.

Our strategy came from the insight that readers have no time in the mornings to read the newspaper. They use breaks in the workplace to catch up on reading the paper. This led to an innovation where we teamed up with neighbourhood newspaper vendors and replaced the morning newspaper with mouse pads. These had a simple message urging them to log onto the net to read the news. These mouse pads would be carried to the workplace and they’d access the net from there. Thus, the mouse pad led the consumer from his doorstep to the internet.