Overview
This is one of those moments where you think "how did I not think of that?". With the infiltration of advertising on, uhh, everything, it's with little surprise that some clever cookie in Dubai clicked that drinking coffee and reading the newspaper often go hand in hand (literally), and so why not combine the two? Genius.
With the brief prescribed by Gulf News to gain subscribers and increase web traffic, Y&R had the innovative thought to to turn a coffee cup sleeve into a social media opportunity. The resulting 'Headline News Cup Sleeve' is now printed using a special printer at the point of sale. It pulls tweets from the Gulf News Twitter account and so not only are you reading the news with your coffee, it's fresh and individualised content.
With the general/cynic's consensus being that printed news is jumping the shark a bit, this definitely stands out as a novel way to keep the printed word fresh. And while normally we are against being bombarded with advertising and mass media, there's something in the personalisation of this that is fun and novel.