Newspapers bring Kiwis together

Background

1.6 Million New Zealanders read a newspaper everyday. If something is on the front page then the whole nation knows about it. It’s a shared experience.

The Newspapers Publishers’ Association wanted to remind advertisers how powerful the papers can be, bringing people together. And they wanted to do this in a way that would give them plenty of additional PR.

Idea

Rather than just saying that newspapers bring people together, Special set out to prove it.

They started with the truth that when you are in a foreign country, picking up a paper from home instantly connects you with home.

The idea, then, was to get the 100,000+ Kiwis living in London to experience that sudden feeling of connectedness and get them to respond to the experience.

The front page of the London Metro was printed to replicate the front page of New Zealand’s biggest-selling daily, The New Zealand Herald.

So on one particular morning, every Kiwi going to work in London that day found themselves reading about events back home.

They were then encouraged to photograph themselves holding the paper (which led to some surprising images !) and email these to New Zealand, where they were turned into full-page ads which ran explaining how nespapers connect people, wherever they are.

Results

Almost a thousand images were submitted. Numerous PR stories were written in newspapers and in industry trade publications and websites about the innovative campaign. It reframed the newspaper industry as modern and inventive and gained much positive feedback from advertisers and media buyers.

Our Thoughts

I can drone on for hours insisting that integration is not so much about your media selection but more about becoming a part of people’s lives and by my criteria, then,

this is a brilliantly integrated idea.

No-one actually knows how many New Zealanders there are in London because many have European or British passports but it is reckoned to be as many as 150,000.

So wrapping the London Metro in the New Zealand Herald on October 19th would have been a window thrown open on life back home in the shared anxiety of the run-up to the World Cup final.

More than that, the idea worked both ways. It touched Kiwis here so they coulkd, in their turn, touch Kiwis back home. The fact that around a thousand people uploaded photos of themselves tells you something about the power of print.

This idea just wouldn’t have worked on an iPad. It was the physical reminder of home as those Kiwis took the tube or the bus to work that got them, and thousands more I’ll bet, emailing/calling/writing home that day.