Since 2005, GUP Magazine – the Guide to Unique Photography – has been publishing its inspiring magazine of photography, and more specifically: art photography. In its most recent issue, which centers on photography in Los Angeles, GUP has brought its collection of astounding photography to life with interactive print.

Click here to scan the cover of GUP Magazine!

A special motion-graphic animation on the cover (created by Marija Danilovic, see above) featuring Angelina Jolie welcomes readers to the issue. Inside, as readers flip through the various photographers’ galleries, they can scan the pages to view video documentaries, films and trailers for a behind-the-scenes look. 

“We decided to add interactive elements to the magazine because it adds an extra layer to our current content,” says Peter Bas of GUP Magazine, who calls the Layar Creator “quick, cheap and easy.”

With the Layar Creator, its easy to quickly link extra digital content to print pages, increasing reader engagement and opening doors to new, digital commerce opportunities for publishers.

“Most of the featured photographers also film their projects nowadays,” adds Bas. “In a magazine it’s impossible to show this, but with Layar’s technology it is. The additional layer is a direct enrichment to the content of the magazine and to the reader experience.”

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Later this year, PSV Eindhoven – one of the oldest and most successful Dutch football clubs – will celebrate its 100th anniversary. Starting this week, the club is counting down the last 100 days until its 100th birthday with a daily interactive print campaign with Layar in the local newspaper Eindhovens Dagblad.

A series of articles and ads in the newspaper detail the history of the club. Fans can scan the pages with Layar to view extra videos of exciting moments from the last 100 years of PSV, interesting facts, unique stories as well as social media comments from fans on Twitter and Facebook.

“PSV is a very professional, marketing-driven organization which is always looking for new, innovative ways to communicate with their fans,” says Layar Partner Limebizz, which worked with PSV on the campaign. Incorporating Layar’s technology into this momentous campaign allows the club to interact with its fans continuously over the course the 100-day countdown in a unique way.

“Layar gives us the opportunity to share all memorable moments from 100 years of PSV,” said Guus Pennings, Head of Marketing for PSV. “Together with Limebizz and their conceptual approach, we developed an attractive Layar campaign.”

PSV isn’t the first football club to use the Layar Creator to build an interactive print campaign. Just last month, another Dutch club, ADO Den Haag, enhanced its logo and encouraged fans to scan it during a match to enter a contest and purchase special team items.

Click here to try the PSV campaign out by scanning with Layar!

Fans of thrilling fiction novels have long been anticipating its release, and now you can get a sneak peek with Layar!

Inferno, the latest book from author Dan Brown, author of the massively popular Da Vinci Code, is the latest book to use Layar’s interactive print to help promote its release. Readers in the Netherlands can get an exclusive look at this highly anticipated release by using Layar to scan an ad for the new book.

By scanning the ad in Volkskrant Magazine, fans can read, watch, listen and buy with just a few taps. Brown readers can get a sneak peek of the first chapter, watch a video trailer for the book, listen to a sample of the audio book or directly buy the book right from their phone! 

Volkskrant Magazine is distributed with de Volkskrant newspaper, which translates to “the people’s paper.” De Volkskrant is the largest newspapers in the Netherlands, read by 750,000 people each day. Already, thousands of readers have scanned the ad and interacted using Layar. Volkskrant Magazine is part of multimedia publisher de Persgroep. De Persgroep Advertising worked together with their client to produce this ad.

“We enjoy looking for creative crossmedia solutions together with clients to be able to interact with our readers”, says Olav Bongarts, director of de Persgroep Advertising. “We are quite overwhelmed by the success! More than 2,000 readers scanned the ad with Layar and created almost 5,000 interactions. It’s great that we can measure the Return on Investment so quickly and accurately.”

Interactive print has seen a lot of activity lately around books as publishers use Layar to promote new releases in exciting and engaging new ways. Just last month we shared with you how CBS Outdoor had again used Layar on advertising for popular author David Baldacci’s latest novel, boosting web traffic to Baldacci’s site by over 500%!

Click here to see the ad and try it yourself with Layar!

As part of our continuing effort to test, improve and update our interactive print resources and tools, we have made a significant upgrade to our calls-to-action.

Download the refreshed Layar Call-to-Action Pack, including the Layar Logo and the all new Call-to-Action Guidelines.

Our research and experience have shown that proper calls-to-action are imperative to the success of an interactive print campaign. Alerting your users through descriptive and explanatory calls-to-action is, more often than not, more important than the overall quality of the digital content. After all, if users don’t know about your content, it doesn’t matter how great it is!

Thanks to over 40,000 Creator editors publishing campaigns, popular interactive print titles reaching millions of homes monthly, over 30 million Layar App users and sophisticated analytics, we have a unique vantage point from which to observe how users are consuming interactive print.

Based on our observations, we have identified the most effective calls-to-action. Therefore, we have reviewed, user-tested and redesigned our calls-to- action to better provide you with the most efficient ways to make your campaigns more apparent to your users.

The Call-to-Action Guidelines are part of our goal to unify calls-to-action across campaigns to educate new interactive print users while providing a seamless experience.

^{Photo by Will Halsey/Bloomberg Businessweek}

Our friends at the Dutch fashion brand SuitSupply are back again with a huge, week-long insert campaign in the Wall Street Journal.

Just a few months ago in March we shared how SuitSupply launched its spring catalogue with an interactive print campaign that let you purchase items and see behind the scenes videos from their stylish photoshoots. Now, the brand is making a big push in the United States, publishing an interactive fashion newspaper in the Wall Street Journal.

The 32-page insert has been running since last Friday, May 9th and has the potential to reach 1.2 million subscribers per day. With the help of Layar partner Limebizz, the newspaper was made interactive with the Layar Creator.

“We’re getting a bigger footprint in the U.S., and we’re seeing lots more people going to our online store, so it made sense to do some with a bit of a broader reach,” CEO Fokke de Jong said in an interview with BusinessWeek.

The insert is a huge ad campaign from SuitSupply, and the fact that they’ve chosen to make it an interactive print campaign with Layar’s technology says a lot about their confidence in this new medium.

Brands are seeing higher engagement in ads and editorial content with interactive print, so it’s no surprise the SuitSupply again has chosen interactive print for this important campaign.