Tricking Japanese teenagers into reading newspapers
How do you get young people to rediscover the value of newspapers? A Japanese newspaper found a solution: By simply putting it on a product they buy anyway. To achieve this, Mainichi combined print and packaging to create a completely new medium: The news bottle.
Each year, fewer young people read printed newspapers. At the same time, mineral water is the best selling product in Japanese convenient stores. Mainichi used the popularity of this product and decided to print news on the packaging.
The challenge of this was to make consumers able to read a different article every day. This meant that 31 different products had to be created for each month. But the campaign had another benefit: Through AR technology the digital natives could access latest news online, which also created buzz for the online articles.
