Thursday’s cover of The Grid will have readers doing a double take. Or at least a double tilt.
The June 21 issue of the weekly free Toronto city magazine will feature a unique cover treatment – a hologram that features a regular editorial cover from one angle and an image of the 2013 Subaru BRZ sports coupe when it is slightly tilted.
The special cover is part of a broader national campaign that will start its major roll-out in early July to launch the new car. In keeping with the campaign’s creative concept that the Subaru BRZ is so hot that it sets anything around it on fire, the car portion of The Grid’s hologram cover materializes from under a layer of flames.
Explaining how the idea for the cover treatment came to be, Laas Turnbull, The Grid’s publisher and editor-in-chief, said his sales team got a call from OMD Canada—which works on Subaru with DDB Canada—a couple of months ago. OMD was looking for a creative idea for the launch of the car and the message was clear, says Turnbull: they didn’t want anything run-of-the-mill.
DDB Canada ACD Paul Riss adds that OMD had approached “select media outlets” to come up with arresting print execution ideas to accelerate the buzz around the car in Canada. “It’s a hot new car and we wanted each element in the integrated campaign to turn heads,” says Riss.
Turnbull admits that when the team at The Grid came up with a rough idea for the hologram cover, they thought it was “really far fetched” and potentially not mechanically or monetarily possible. But OMD and DDB were big fans of the concept. “They loved the direction right away,” he says.
Once the agencies refined the idea, the team at The Grid had to hustle to finish the June 21 cover almost a month before it went to press so that the intensive printing process – called lenticular printing – would be finished on time.
Each of the covers of the 70,000 issues – the full run of The Grid’s circulation – had to be hand-tipped in order to achieve the hologram effect. The hand tipping alone is a 24-hour process, says Turnbull.
Turnbull is pleased with the result. Even though it was an ambitious idea with a tight turnaround, he appreciated that the magazine and its two partners on this execution worked well together. “It was not a case of ‘We can’t do this, it’s too difficult’ it was a case of ‘Okay, this is awesome, how are we going to do this?’”
