Sunday’s set to be a big day for Australian print newspaper readers with a ‘bonus’ edition and the launch of an AR-enabled magazine insert.
• Catalogue printer Franklin Web has scored a first Australian editorial application for its Blippar augmented reality app. The technology will be a feature of new News Limited magazine insert Sunday Style, which launches in the Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Herald Sun this weekend.
• And News Limited will publish a bonus edition of the traditionally-broadsheet Weekend Australian for subscribers, in advance of Monday’s switch to compact format for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. Advertiser BMW is understood to have ‘bought’ all three editions and anything could happen.
The ‘free’ one-off Sunday edition of The Weekend Australian is sponsored by BMW and newsagents will be paid to deliver it. We haven’t heard anything, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be a tabloid as well. (It didn't – see below).
News’ Sunday Style appears across print, tablet and smartphone. The print version is a 76-page A4 glossy. Readers will be able to scan editorial images using the award-winning Blippar technology – to which Franklin has Australian rights – to access additional content.
Editor-in-chief Kerrie McCallum says the three platforms will extend the magazine’s brand longevity and offer consumers “new ways to join the conversation”… a reference (unintended or otherwise) to a recent The Age slogan.
“With the magazine, enhanced app and our use of Blippar, Sunday Style is a truly interactive experience that offers a three way conversation at all times,” she says.
A standalone interactive digital magazine for iPad will feature enhanced content from the print product plus extras such as unseen images, audio, videos and profiles from fashion shoots and “meet the team” Q&As.
A ‘shop mode’ feature allows readers to buy items directly from the page, and there will be social media integration with live Twitter and Instagram feeds and ‘touch points’.
News Limited group sales director Fiorella Di Santo says Sunday Style has been launched to give advertisers a premium environment to engage their audiences: “We have been overwhelmed with interest from advertisers showing a real appetite for a quality lifestyle brand in the market,” she says.
“The addition of an enhanced app and the use of Blippar provide these brands more innovative advertising options to engage their audiences across more platforms and through the same highly influential title.”
Fairfax Media has its own inhouse-developed AR technology.
• GXpress went to its local newsagent to advance-order Monday’s compact Fairfax editions and was told, “It’s going to be like the Courier-Mail”. We’re hoping it’s not.
• Sunday update: Newsagents near the GX office had copies of the Sunday Telegraph – but no Sunday Style supplement – and while some were giving away copies of the Weekend Australian Sunday edition, others had none. So we bought a copy of Fairfax's Sun-Herald instead and noted how it's improved... but more of that another time. Apart from ads spruiking the upcoming 'compact' SMH, there was a collectors' offer of digitally-printed copies of Monday's paper, for $300 plus GST!
Oh, and the Oz had a decent amount of new content, 12 broadsheet pages of BMW advertising plus the same number of bottom-of-page strips... and a reminder that last time they published a Sunday edition it only lasted a little over a year. This one of planned only as a one-off.
Peter Coleman