Research groups had underlined for us that consumers struggled to understand how this product worked. We needed to create a simple analogy for what WiFi Calling actually does. In Ireland people refer to areas of poor phone coverage as “black spots”. We realised that this was the simplest and clearest way of communicating the product – WiFi Calling gets rid of black spots. Once we had this insight, we pushed ourselves to bring this to life in the most surprising way we could.

We began asking ourselves whether we could remove all the black spots in our ads. Which lead us to a much bigger thought… What if we removed all of the black spots in an entire magazine or newspaper (every full stop, every semi colon, every tittle on every i and every j) and replaced them with a colourful eir dot?

With that question, we had our idea.

With this campaign, the medium was essential to the idea – creating an analogy for how this complex product worked. We took over the entire Irish Daily Mail Magazine and removed every single black spot. Every full stop, every semi colon, every tittle on every ‘i’ and every ‘j’ was replaced with a colourful eir dot. Readers found out the reason in a full-page advert for eir at the back of the magazine.

This was an incredibly complex challenge. The nature of print journalism is such that copy is still being added right up until it goes to print. And with this idea, every single piece of copy in the paper was affected – headlines, bylines, captions, etc. In order to implement the idea, the Daily Mail actually had to move their copy deadlines in order to give their designers enough time to work overnight to remove every black dot.

In terms of results, our coverage had no black spots. In a country with a population of 4.7 million, our single ad placed in a newspaper with a circulation of just 41,000 has reached upwards of 6.7 million people.*

It generated 26 articles featured in 35 publications across 16 countries and took Twitter by storm.*

It also brought new life to a medium in which people seldom innovate, generating overwhelmingly positive sentiment and mentions in notable publications including AdWeek and Shots.

“Print isn’t dead. In fact it’s more insidious than ever.” Adweek

*Source: Olytico Social Media & News Media Monitoring