And now, secrets of Fairfax’s print product innovations are revealed

An advertising wrapper around ‘The Age’ and the 'Sydney Morning Herald' today is just one of a series of technical innovations – including fragrance and ‘pop-out’ pages – being used by Fairfax Media to add marketing appeal to its print products.

Printed on semi-transparent paper, the wrapper for Toyota’s Prado 4WD surrounds the newspaper’s normal front page and bears the slogan, “One drive and everything becomes clear.”

At a conference in Bangkok last week, Paul Peters, manager of the Fairfax Printers Chullora print centre which prints the ‘Herald’, said Fairfax – which was the first Australian publisher to automate the application of ‘stick-on notes’ – was working on a number of product innovations.

One of these is spraying fragrance onto newspapers while they are being printed. While already used in the controlled environment of magazines, the ‘scratch and sniff’ concept was hard to apply to newspapers.

Peters said the use of microencapsulated fragrance provided a solution: “That way, the scent stays on the newsprint until it is rubbed,” he says. “It’s a real opportunity.”

A coffee-scented issue of the ‘Herald’ Good Living supplement appeared in September and a promotion for a fragrance (pictured) is underway. Coconut and pine oils, and the aromas of popcorn and roast chicken are among others that can be replicated.

Viewed as a sampling technique, costs of about 12 cents a copy are also more competitive than a comparable magazine promotion. Fragrance is dispensed under pressure from a container similar to a beer keg, with about 35 kg of coffee fragrance used for a 230,000-copy print run.

Fairfax has also worked out how to run part webs on its manroland double-width presses, delivering unusual product formats it calls ‘pop-outs’. Among these are half-depth pages in tabloid products. The secret has been to ‘trick’ the software which controls reelstand equipment into believing it is handling a standard reel width.

Peters says that the opportunity to develop these products has come partly as a result of the effect of reduced advertising volumes on pagination. “We wouldn’t have had the time for this, if it hadn’t been for the downturn,” he says.

With 430 print publications worldwide, Fairfax owns (or part-owns) 15 print sites in Australia – of which Chullora is the biggest by tonnage – and nine in New Zealand. The company has spent $165 million on plant upgrades in the last four years.

Peters spoke at the South East Asia Newspapers Group’s second annual conference in Bangkok as a guest of the group.