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'Tear this ad out,
see the man turn red'

Magazine ad morphs into an alternative media stunt

By Toni Fitzgerald
Jun 24, 2009

It’s every advertiser’s goal to get people to pay attention to their ad. Even better is to get people to experience the product through the ad.

But how?

An agency in Brazil came up with a unique approach: an ad for a sunscreen that the reader could take out of a magazine and expose to sunlight to see the benefits of the sun-blocker.

The ad was printed with special ink that changed color when exposed to sunlight.

The two-page spread shows a woman and a man at the beach lying down on side-by-side lounge chairs, clad in their bathing suits. They are both relatively fair-skinned.

Next to the woman is a bag with a bottle of Sundown sunscreen peaking out. Next to the man are a paddleball racket and a ball.

On the page beside them is a message: "Expose the image to the sun and discover who uses Sundown and who doesn’t use it."

You guessed it. The man, whose impage was printed with the special ink, turns a light red. The woman’s skin remains the same.

"We wanted to create a piece that brings to life the experience of the product, the real effect," says Geraldo Gonçalves, who worked on the ad for DDB Brasil.

"Thinking about that, we came up with the idea to create a piece that reacts with the sun, just like our skin. The second step was to find a technology that made possible this effect. We found a special ink that reacts with the light."

The ad ran in Revista Veja, one of Brazil’s largest economics magazines, in February.

The ad was effective on several levels.

It illustrated the benefit of the product in a clear manner: Use our product and you are protected from the sun; skip it, and you get a painful sunburn.

It also works across two media, offering the best of both. It's first a magazine ad, and gaining lots of exposure as such. But it becomes an effective alternative media campaign once a reader chooses to pull it out.

But perhaps more important, it truly engaged people, encouraging them to spend the time to take the ad out of the magazine and expose it to sunlight to see for themselves the sunscreen's benefits.

"The piece was perfect for the current moment of the brand here in Brazil, for a brand that understands about solar protection," Gonçalves says. "The piece was able to show that in a universal language."

Apparently the message got through. Sales of Sundown rose 5 percent the month after the ad ran.

Toni Fitzgerald is a staff writer for Media Life.	© 2009 Media Life Magazine

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