When you hear the old advertising adage “sex sells,” you usually associate it with scantily clad women put on display to help sell beer, cars and other items to men. But what “the other half?”

The Charleston Animal Society (CAS) from Charleston, South Carolina, is using this tactic for good by enlisting the help of hunky local firemen (and a few firewomen as well) to spice up their 2015 calendar benefiting Toby’s Fund, the society’s medical fund for abused animals. And best of all, it’s been made interactive with Layar!

Putting a new spin on the infamous “firefighter calendar,” the CAS had the firefighters pose with cute and cuddly rescue dogs and cats. When scanned with the Layar App, each month’s photo comes alive with a video of the firefighter and their furry friend.

The CAS was forced to nearly double its initial print run of 6,000 calendars to 11,000 due to the high demand for the calendar. The society was lucky enough to have their project picked up by popular media outlets, such as the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, The Daily Mail, the Today Show and more. According to Caroline Eller of the CAS, the society has received orders from around the world, including China, Australia, Norway, Peru, Brazil and Germany.

“Being in the printing industry I am always looking for new ideas and ways to help my clients,” said Don Oswalt of Nelson Printing, who produced the calendar for the CAS. “There was a lot nervousness in the beginning since it was so new to us and not having produced anything with Layar platform before. We are very proud how Layar and its amazing technology has set this calendar apart as a one of a kind.”

To give it a try yourself, head on over to our Client Examples page!

Bangkok, Thailand-based graphic design agency Work Actually has recently partnered with Thanachart (TNC) Bank, one of Thailand’s largest banks, to help bring a bit of interactivity to its customers.

Each year the bank gives out calendars to current and new customers, and this year scanning the calendar with the Layar App reveals extra digital content. Work Actually has commissioned portraits of Thailand’s King, Bhumibol Adulyadej by artist Atelier PorChong to feature in the calendar.

Scanning the portraits plays music composed by the King himself, who is actually an accomplished jazz saxophone player. A total of 800,000 calendars have been printed and distributed to bank branches, including 450,000 hanging calendars and 350,000 desk calendars.

So far the calendars have been a great success in Thailand, attracting hundreds of thousands of pageviews and interactions. What’s even more impressive is the average user is scanning over-and-over, with an average of 10 pageviews and 8 interactions per person. It’s only a few weeks into the new year and already around 3% of the calendars have been scanned, based on unique users.

Check out the video above to see more about this campaign, or try it yourself by scanning here on our Client Examples page.

Stockmans Kalenders, a Belgian calendar printer, has worked together Dutch human resources consulting firm Randstad to create a truly unique calendar for 2013.

Randstad’s 2013 calendar has been enhanced with Layar’s interactive print, allowing users to access quick links, watch videos and jump to content on the Randstad website instantaneously by scanning the calendar with their mobile device. It’s a unique use of interactive print and features some really beautiful buttons and enhancements, as you can see in the video above.

We caught up with Stockmans Managing Director Bruno Devos to chat about how Stockmans is using Layar to create unique, interactive calendars.

“As a calendar company and being part of an innovative printing group we were looking for interactive content for an ‘old’ product: our calendars,” says Devos. “We want customers to highlight actual and interactive communication via our calendar projects. We also use print as a communication tool to go a step further via print-to-web.”

“The Group De Bie – Stockmans, located in Duffel, Belgium, launched just 10 days ago ‘Proppolis,’ a bridge for communication agencies to make print interactive,” says Devos. “In January I started a screening project to use AR in our printed products. After this analysis we decided to go for Layar as our AR engine.” 

According to Devos, the decision to use Layar was based on several different criteria, including cost, user friendliness, front- and back-end stability, community, prior use cases, learning curve, easy-to-use result analysis, availability on different platforms, and more. As for using the Creator, Devos says his team had a very positive experience.

“Our people in design were very happy with the Layar Creator,” he said.