Toronto’s evening newspaper, Tonight, got a little thicker on Dec. 14 thanks to a one-day ad campaign promoting Rogers‘ LTE internet service.
Rogers bought the entirety of the independent paper’s ad space plus enough space to add eight extra pages, bringing the page count up to 24 from the usual 16. Rogers’ ads, branding and colour-scheme exclusively dominate the issue.
The campaign was handled by media agency OMD, who approached Tonight to set up the takeover.
“The neat thing about it was they were saying, ‘let us help you give more content to your readers,’” said Tonight publisher John Cameron.
“There’s a lot more content in this paper than usual,” he said, including material they’d wanted to run previously but didn’t have space for, such as photos, holiday-themed stories and more “Shout-Outs,” one of the paper’s more popular features that lets readers send messages to other people who might be reading the paper (Cameron calls it “social media in print”).
OMD, Rogers and Tonight began work on the idea last fall. “The good thing was that OMD planned ahead,” said Cameron, noting that the ad takeover was planned far enough in advance that other advertisers were not irked about Rogers being the sole advertiser in the issue.
Tonight recently partnered with Sony to put out a paper the size of one of its e-Reader. Last year, it published a special Toronto Blue Jays themed-issue that had team members guest edit the paper.
