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As convenient as they are, our screens and devices fail to adequately recreate the tactile experience of reading on paper. An evocative South African video campaign now aims to remind audiences of the value of print.
A campaign featuring three short videos crafted to trigger an emotional response and nostalgia for print as a publishing medium is being spearheaded by Associated Media Publishing (AMP) in South Africa, in collaboration with various industry players. “We felt that consumers have been bombarded about how print and paper are bad for the environment and have forgotten the important role that printed products actually play in our lives,” explains Julia Raphaely, CEO of AMP. “There is still an important job to be done in changing consumer perception of the print and paper category.”
The three half-minute videos show print pages turning into whimsical origami objects and creatures to evoke memories of holding print, reading print and the journeys it took the reader on.
The first video calls to mind the viewer’s first experience of a book, the feeling of the paper and the characters depicted. It echoes childhood rhymes, and ends with the words: “It’s easy to remember, just open the page, take a deep breath and become another age.”
The second video by creative director Rotem Shachar celebrates the sense of holiday-like seclusion, quiet privacy and bliss that can be experienced while indulging in a good magazine. As origami coconuts created by artist Ross Symons grow into palm trees to support a hammock on a beach, the words remind viewers of days “spent alone without anything at all, not even your phone. Drifting off to other places through pictures and words. No technology around, just the tweeting of birds.”
The third video is still in production. Ideally, the sponsor would be a paper supplier and its focus will either be ‘Imagine a world without knowledge (instruction manuals, pharmaceutical pamphlets, textbooks) or ‘Imagine a world without choices’ (Fast-Moving Consumer Goods – rows of unnamed/unbranded food items).
AMP produces iconic titles such as Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping, WOW and House & Leisure. Raphaely says, “We want to remind viewers how much they appreciate the printed medium for exactly what it does in addition to the many digital channels that we all use every day.”
Raphaely stresses that the ‘Make Time for Print’ videos take nothing away from the importance of the digital medium, “Digital is equally fantastic for different reasons. But I do think at this point it is time to give recognition to the special experience people have when engaging with print.”
In the absence of any industry association to represent the interests of magazine media in Southern Africa, AMP with Novus Holdings as the first sponsor, have taken on the campaign to promote print on behalf of the industry as a whole.
Raphaely explains: “I see this campaign as a beautiful, evocative body of work that will remind people all over the globe to make time for themselves as well as for print. We wanted to get consumers to fall in love with paper and print again. To feel that somethings just can’t be replaced. The strategy was very simply to communicate that life without printed products would be hard to imagine.”
The videos will be featured on participating companies’ web pages and will also be shared on social media.
The hope is that with a simple and emotive message, the campaign will resonate with audiences and help spread the message that it would indeed be hard to imagine a world without print.
by Piet van Niekerk @PietNiekerk
Re-published with kind permission of FIPP, the network for global media
