Albron, a Dutch food services company, has teamed up with communications agency de Toekomst to bring Layar’s Augmented Reality technology to its restaurant menus. Albron, which operates Grand Café-style restaurants at Center Parcs Holiday Villages across western Europe, commissioned de Toekomst to produce interactive menus that resemble newspapers.
The frontier of Interactive Print, as it spreads across the globe, has made a stop in paradise.
MediaHouse, one of the largest media companies in Bermuda, has introduced Layar’s technology in its portfolio of properties, including the Bermuda Sun newspaper, Bermuda.com, Island Press and more.
Readers of the Bermuda Sun can see stories and advertisements come alive with videos, photo galleries and music four sections of the paper: News, Life, Sports and Tech. The printed Bermuda.com guide for April (pictured on the right) features a cover video that brings the photo of a flyboarder to life. And employees at the Island Press are having fun showing off their interactive business cards.
Check out the video below of people around Bermuda reacting to the interactive content.
MediaHouse says it recognizes the opportunity not only to enhance its editorial content, but also to provide a premium service to advertisers. Several ads in the Bermuda.com guide have interactive elements that can be accessed by scanning the pages with the Layar App.
“Advertisers are keen to get their messages onto the smartphones of their audience, careful to entice without annoying,” the company said. “Augmented Reality (AR) provides that opportunity because users engage their smartphone or tablet voluntarily.”
The company says it intends to increase its use of Layar going forward, so expect more great content from Bermuda in the future!
Canada has been a hotbed of Interactive Print activity with newspapers ever since we partnered with publishers like Glacier Media and national papers like The Toronto Star. Over that time, Canadian papers have produced some outstanding campaigns using the Layar Creator and now they’re being rewarded for their creativity and innovation.
Three different Layar campaigns have been awarded five prizes at the 2014 Great Idea Awards, a ceremony honoring excellence in newspaper promotion and marketing in Canada. The awards for Layar campaigns include three 1st place prizes for both Glacier Media and The Toronto Star.
The Toronto Star’s “Go Beyond” campaign – a fully interactive newspaper produced in partnership with Nissan Canada – took 1st place for Print Innovation and 2nd place in the Advertising category for daily newspapers. “Scene,” a fully Layar-enabled magazine from Glacier Media’s Prince George Citizen (Prince George, British Columbia), took home a pair of 1st place prizes in the Magazine and Young Reader Engagement Initiative categories.
“It is a truly interactive print product that drives reader engagement using Layar technology,” said Norm Coyne, founder of Scene. “The ability of readers to use their smartphones to interact with the content and ads in the magazine has taken the Scene PG to a whole new level.”
Another Glacier Media paper – The Peak from Powell River, British Columbia – was awarded a 2nd place prize in the Newspaper Marketing & Promotion category. The campaign encouraged readers to discover the paper’s interactive features through a contest which raised funds for a local hockey club mascot.
“Our staff all participated enthusiastically in the Layar promotion that we hosted as game-night sponsor for our Powell River Kings Junior Hockey Team. They even brought their children to help demonstrate Layar to fans,” said Joyce Carlson, Publisher at Peak Publishing. “Sharing Layar technology was rewarding and placing second in Canada for our entry was extremely satisfying. I’m proud of our staff for coming up with this creative project.”
The awards will be presented at the annual Newspapers Canada Ink & Beyond conference in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island on May 29th.
To discover more about how newspapers can take advantage of Interactive Print, visit our Layar in Newspapers page where you can download our Newspaper Industry Overview.
Newspapers around the globe – from national dailies to local weeklies – are using Interactive Print to boost revenue and reader engagement. Given this growth, we thought it was a great time to share our insights on how AR adds value to this industry.
Yesterday we hosted another of our popular webinars in which our North American Director of Business Development Nigel Newton detailed how Interactive Print can benefit the newspaper industry. 
We also shared great Interactive Print examples from papers all over the world.
These included the Toronto Star and Glacier Media from Canada, De Volkskrant and Wegener Media from the Netherlands, Folio Magazine from the United States and Lancashire & North West from the United Kingdom, among several others.
To accompany to the webinar, we’ve created a Newspaper Industry Overview, which dives into trends, methods and the 6 business benefits of Interactive Print for newspapers. Visit our Layar for Newspapers page to download the overview and to download the slides and recording of the webinar!
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!
