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!

^{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.

Back in February we told you about our exciting partnership with Canada’s Glacier Media, which is using Layar in over a dozen local newspapers on a regular basis. To help promote this partnership, Glacier has produced a 30-second television ad to show off the power of interactive print.

“Imagine being able to interact with your newspaper, purchase what you want whenever you want it, investigate your interests, look past the surface,” the ad says. “Don’t just read your newspaper, experience it.”

It’s a really well-made ad and it perfectly explains the core benefits of interactive print - being able to bring the digital interactivity we know and love from the web to print materials.

Recently, Belgian creative agency Think Yellow teamed up with Layar partner agency Limebizz to create a truly engaging augmented reality experience for a special mystery client that drew an incredible amount of attention in Antwerp’s central train station.

The project, called “What’s In the Container,” centered around a mysterious bright orange cargo container assembled in the station’s main atrium. Around it, instructions were placed to attract passers by to scan the box with Layar for a hint about the container’s contents. If, on the day the container is to be opened, they could “crack the code,” they could win whatever was inside the box.

With tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people passing through the station, the project garnered quite a bit of attention. Social media was a powerful driver of this, as people were encouraged to use YouTube and Facebook to participate in the campaign.

They could step into the “Babble Box” and leave a video comment about what they thought was inside. Over 1,000 videos were recorded and automatically uploaded to YouTube, as people of all ages left their guesses about the contents. As more people “Liked” the container on Facebook, more hints were revealed about what was inside, encouraging sharing and spreading the message.

Scanning the side of the container with Layar displayed an AR video that let users “look inside” the container to see even more hints. The combination of social media and augmented reality from Layar made for a very engaging and attractive experience for visitors to the station.

Just recently, the code was cracked and the mystery was solved. The mystery client was Belgian cava maker Grand Baron and the container was packed with the bubbly stuff! Check out the video below to see the opening, which featured musicians and dancers choreographed in a beautiful ceremony.

This campaign is a perfect example of the extensibility of Layar’s interactive print! It’s great not just for individual experiences on the pages of a magazine, but – as we’ve seen with the great success of projects from CBS Outdoor – it also works great with large-form advertising in public, like billboards, posters or big bright orange containers full of champagne.

“The Layar App gave our static container a dynamic feature that has caught the imagination of many visitors,” said Think Yellow. “It really came to life and distinguished our project from many other projects in Antwerp Central Station.”