More big news from the Great White North! Glacier Media, Western Canada’s largest local media company, is launching a massive interactive print rollout with its newspapers in British Columbia. In total, 12 newspapers will incorporate Layar’s technology, with more papers lined up to join soon.

Read our press release here!

Editorial and advertising content in each of Glacier’s twelve local newspaper properties and one real estate publication in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia – a circulation of over 500,000 – will feature Layar’s innovative and enriching interactive print technology. Readers will be treated to a more engaging print experience, as extra digital content is displayed when they scan the pages with the Layar App.

“This will allow print to come to life,” said Alvin Brouwer, president of Lower Mainland Publishing, a division of Glacier Media. “It adds many different dimensions to a print advertising campaign or to the stories and photos that appear in our papers.”

Glacier Media joins a growing group of printers and publishers choosing Layar as its augmented reality and interactive print platform of choice. Fry Communications, one the largest printers in the United States, similarly chose Layar to provide interactive print solutions to its customers just last month.

We’ve already seen proven success in Canada. A recent interactive print advertising campaign for Nissan across a dozen Canadian newspapers produced a 65% increase in test drives for the automaker while helping its creative agencies earn the coveted “Best in Show” prize at the Media Innovation Awards.

“This is a game changer,” said Shelly Wilson, Vice President of Digital Sales at Glacier Media. “The Layar technology provides us the opportunity to increase newsprint’s utility to our readers and advertisers enabling immediate action.”

A video posted by Newspaperswork, a Belgian print marketing platform, is a humorous and interesting take on the power of print to engage its readers.

In it, they provided three ad execs from leading companies with personal chauffeurs for the day so they could focus on reading the paper during their commute. Unbeknownst to the execs, Newspaperswork planned for some interesting, funny and ridiculous things to happen along the way - things that would normally catch your attention.

Bears driving cars, a man on fire, golfers in the medians … the inanity was on full blast just beyond the window of the car. However, in each case, the ad exec had their eyes buried in their newspaper and never noticed any of the antics going on around them.

A funny spin on the engagement of print, but it comes with truth as well. This is just another example of why print is far from dead, because readers are highly engaged with print products while reading.

With Layar’s interactive print technology, print engagement can reach even higher rates. One YouTube commenter sarcastically notes, “I wonder why they didn’t post this video in a newspaper but on the internet.” Well, with Layar, they could have done just that.

Yesterday marked the opening of Fashion Week here in Amsterdam, and to spread the word today, they’ve enhance the front pages of every big newspaper in the Netherlands.

From de Volkskrant to Spits to Trouw and of course De Telegraaf - all of them have content waiting to be unlocked and viewed by scanning them with Layar. The fashion house Marga Weimans is behind the “take over,” which features a special video and other info about Fashion Week.

If you’re in the Netherlands, pick up a newspaper, scan it with Layar and check out the videos and other content. Watch the video below to see today’s papers come to life!

Read our full press release here!

Many months of hard work have finally brought us to this moment, so today we here at Layar are beyond excited to finally introduce to you … the Layar Creator.

If you’ve followed our recent activity, you already know that we’ve partnered time and again with magazine and newspaper publishers to help enhance the static pages of their publications with digital content. We aided publishers by offering to produce these layers ourselves, but what you may not have known is that some of our more recent projects have been built completely by the publishers themselves.

The last two issues of LINDA. Magazine, including the L’HOMO issue, all enhanced with dozens of buttons? They did that. The vtwonen magalogue with all of its “Buy” buttons? They did it all themselves as well. The same goes for the latest Eppo comic from Senefelder, the VPRO Gids, the NRC.next newspaper and more.

So how did they manage to build augmented reality layers and make their print interactive without any external development assistance? The answer, simply, is the Layar Creator.

Check out some screenshots of the Creator! Click the thumbnails to view larger photos.

The Layar Creator is a self-service web application for activating print pages with digital AR content. Now anyone can upload images or PDFs, drag-and-drop any of a number of digital buttons onto the pages and publish them on the Layar platform - all in a matter of seconds. No fancy code work needed, no developers. Absolutely anybody can do it.

There’s no software to install, and the Layar Creator’s intuitive interface makes it easy for anyone to start activating pages right away. The Layar Creator takes advantage of Layar Vision technology, recognizing existing images from the pages of magazines and newspapers without the need for special markers like QR codes.

How to use the Layar Creator:

“I loved how simple it was to use the Layar Creator with our magazine,” says Monique van Beekhoven, web editor for Sanoma Media’s vtwonen magazine. Using their smartphones, readers could instantly order items in the magazine by tapping “Buy” buttons placed on the pages with the Layar Creator by Monique herself. “I really believe that anyone can do it!”

As we explained in our whitepaper on the subject a few weeks ago, early interactive print campaigns with the Layar Creator have already shown promising results. Roughly 1% of readers who discover activated pages are converted from print to digital by using Layar to interact with the pages. And on average, 20% of all digital content displayed in print through Layar is clicked by the viewer.

Having seen these results, several publishers have already signed on to incorporate the Layar Creator into their publishing process going forward. And with such a low barrier to entry, who can blame them?

“At every editorial meeting, we discuss what will be in the printed magazine and how we can connect that content with Layar,” says Jildou van der Bijl, editor-in-chief of LINDA. Magazine, which has already published three issues with pages activated using the Layar Creator.

Today, anyone can get started using the Layar Creator and all of its features for free. Starting August 1st, pricing for top level features will kick in, but for now, anything you create before then will never be charged. A free, ad-supported tier for the Creator will remain as well.

So, please, be our guest! Give the Layar Creator a try and tell us what you think! We hope you’re as excited as we are.