Branded content/entertainment is still a new concept in the region. So our main challenge was to find a brave partner — a coffee chain that’s willing to modify the design of theircoffee cup sleeve and allow us to turn it into an advertising medium.

Since fresh news goes well with fresh coffee, we adapted the coffee cup sleeve of Tim Hortons, a global coffee chain, into an advertising medium and we created The ‘Headline News’ Cup Sleeve.

Every cup. Every hour. Every day. When Tim Hortons customers received a cup of coffee, they also received the headline news of the hour, printed using a special printer that pulled out tweets from the Gulf News Twitter account. The short URL and QR code on the sleeve then directed them to the Gulf News website where they could read the full story.Timing is everything. So we interacted with our readers when they normally read the newspaper — when they enjoy their freshly brewed coffee.The ‘Headline News’ Cup Sleeve allowed us to be the first throughout the day to deliver breaking news to potential subscribers and make a meaningful connection with them.

• We’re rolling out this project in Tim Hortons’ outlets across the UAE, and in 14 new outlets soon to be opened.• 1,440 headline tweets have been printed on more than 1.6m coffee cups to date.• More than 2,900 new Gulf News Twitter followers in the first 2 weeks of the campaign launch.• The traffic on the Gulf News website grew by 41%.• Subscription’s up by 2.8% so far.