Obtaining permission to place intrusive advertising, both inside and outside the usual space allotted for advertising, was a huge challenge, requiring over six months of negotiations. The incursion of advertising into article space had never occurred at a major Japanese newspaper before. In the end, we obtained permission to place advertising on numerous pages of the newspaper in a way that made every ad pop off the page.

• This two day campaign reached 8 million households.• 77.6% of readers evaluated the campaign highly and had high recall and understanding of the participating companies’ environmental activities.• The newspaper received numerous compliments from readers for, as one person wrote, ‘providing a good opportunity for our family to think about environmental issues’.