In the UAE, coffee chain’s cup sleeve is printed with the hour’s top headline

Recognizing that reading a newspaper often goes hand in hand with drinking coffee, Y&R Dubai adapted coffee chain Tim Hortons' coffee cup sleeves into an advertising medium for Gulf News.

If advertising can be emblazoned on napkins, office coffee cups and beer-bottle tags, then why not the ubiquitous coffee-cup sleeve? That, indeed, is precisely the chosen medium in a new campaign developed recently by Y&R Dubai for Gulf News. Y&R was hired by Gulf News to help it gain subscribers and increase web traffic. Recognizing that reading a newspaper often goes hand in hand with drinking coffee, the agency tapped global coffee chain Tim Hortons – another of its clients in the UAE – and adapted the company’s coffee cup sleeve into an advertising medium. The resulting “Headline News Cup Sleeve” is now printed using a special printer at the Tim Hortons point of sale that pulls tweets from the Gulf News Twitter account. Accordingly, every cup sold in the UAE now bears the newspaper’s current top headline on the coffee sleeve it comes with, with updates made every hour. Also included on the sleeve are a short URL and QR code directing customers to the Gulf News website for the full story. The video below explains the campaign in further detail: Close to 3,000 new Gulf News Twitter followers signed up within the first two weeks of the campaign’s launch, and traffic on the Gulf News website grew by 41 percent, Y&R says. Subscriptions, meanwhile, are up by 2.8 percent so far. One for inspiration! Spotted by: Florent Lesauvage