The basic idea behind this Gold Lion-winning campaign at Cannes Lions 2018 is very good and effective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR2OsxIGDoI
The insight was that consumers did not know that Aldi supermarkets stocked fresh produce. To address this, McCann Spain decided to highlight the freshness of Aldi’s products in a novel way using print advertising – the ad on the right-hand page of the newspaper would feature the news from that same edition that appeared on the left-hand page. Clever, huh?
The ads featured images of Aldi’s freshest produce wrapped in newspaper reporting on the day’s freshest news – an idea inspired by the tradition of markets in Spain wrapping their fresh fruit and vegetables in the day’s newspapers.
This required some precise and last-minute coordination between editorial and production, so McCann and Havas media worked together to make this happen. The video explains it well.
What is truly bizarre is the lengthy introduction in the video. The introduction goes,
“Print newspapers aren’t having a good time.
Their ad revenue has fallen by 50% in six years.
A lot of advertisers think it isn’t an innovative media.
But in Aldi supermarkets, we think outside the box.
Maybe because newspapers are like our fresh products.
They are the freshest thing you’ll find every morning.
And they’re replaced daily.”
While Aldi gets to showcase how fresh its produce is, this introduction actually seems to be making a mockery of the newspaper, ironically. One, it says that newspapers are as perishable as fresh food. That literally means, the newspaper, after one read, is garbage. More than, ‘today’s newspaper is tomorrow’s garbage’, it is literally, ‘today’s newspaper is today’s garbage’!
Two, the garbage angle is drilled further into our consciousness by using newspaper to wrap the fresh food!
Third, and worse, the ‘fresh’ news we just read IS the wrapper for Aldi. So, just like that, they have managed to degrade the power of print while pitching Aldi really well. In a way, it could mean that print is garbage anyway, so please read it online.
So, yes: print newspapers aren’t having a good time. McCann probably made that perception a bit worse!