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For all of our Canadian Layar users, you’ll be excited to hear that we’ve recently opened a Canadian office in Toronto. The office will be run by Nigel Newton, Layar’s newly hired Country Manager for Canada.

The Canadian market has seen exceptional growth for us in recent months with nearly 1 million downloads of the Layar App and 1,000 users of the Layar Creator. Brands like Readers Digest, Nissan and Glacier Media have already begun using Layar to add interactivity to magazines, newspapers and other content in Canada to increase reader engagement and boost advertising revenue.

We’ve selected Nigel Newton from the Layar Partner Network to lead our market development in Canada. Newton introduced interactive print to the mainstream Canadian media in 2012 while leading innovative newspaper advertising projects with Postmedia, Canada’s largest publisher of English language newspapers. In 2012, Newton was also involved in organizing our Activate Print Toronto seminar with the Dutch Embassy. He has proven to be an expert on interactive print.

As interactive print continues to grow worldwide, we are very excited to continue our expansion into the North American market, but best of all is how our Toronto office will better serve our users and customers in Canada and North America.

Nigel’s expertise and proximity to the Canadian market provides easier access to our wealth of knowledge, insights and services, including our Campaign Review Service. This all-new service gives you opportunity to take your campaigns to the next level. Click here to learn more.

Back in February we told you about our exciting partnership with Canada’s Glacier Media, which is using Layar in over a dozen local newspapers on a regular basis. To help promote this partnership, Glacier has produced a 30-second television ad to show off the power of interactive print.

“Imagine being able to interact with your newspaper, purchase what you want whenever you want it, investigate your interests, look past the surface,” the ad says. “Don’t just read your newspaper, experience it.”

It’s a really well-made ad and it perfectly explains the core benefits of interactive print - being able to bring the digital interactivity we know and love from the web to print materials.

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.”

Click here to see Nissan and OMD’s promo video for the campaign.

Over the summer we told you about how automaker Nissan was taking over newspapers in Canada with a massive interactive print campaign. Now, a few months later, we are proud to share that with the help of Layar’s technology, Nissan’s campaign has been awarded Canada’s top advertising award - Best of Show at the Media Innovation Awards.

Check out this video the company used to promote its campaign “Nissan Altima - Innovation that Excites.” Readers of Canada’s top newspapers could scan pull page cover wrap ads to view videos about the car and instantly schedule test drives.

The interactive print campaign, built in a partnership with OMD, PostMedia and TBWA, was a huge success for Nissan. Over 8 million readers viewed the campaign in one day, which lead to more than 6,500 page views at a 42% click-through rate. The most impressive stat? Test drives for the Nissan Altima increased by 65% as a result of the Interactive Print campaign.

“More and more we see brands and publishers using this technology to infuse their print products with the power of the Internet,” said Layar CEO Quintin Schevernels, who says Nissan’s campaign is a testament to the effectiveness of interactive print. “By engaging readers through their smartphones, Nissan’s print advertisements produced substantial results for their business.”

Layar’s interactive print technology helped Nissan came away the big winners last week at the Canadian Media Innovation Awards in Toronto, winning not only Best in Show, but three other awards as well.

Nissan says it plans to keep using Layar in the future, including on another big project coming soon, so stay tuned!

Last week we hosted our second (the first being in Amsterdam this summer) Activate Print event in Toronto, Canada. Dozens of creative and publishing professionals - from ad agencies, newspapers, magazines, book publishers, printing companies, etc. - came together to hear all about Layar, the Creator and some very positive results from successful campaigns. 

As we shared with you last week, the reactions from attendees were outstanding! We wanted to take this opportunity to give you a look inside the event, to hear some of the panelists speak about Layar and their campaigns. 

The video above features clips from our panel discussion with: Maggie Greyson (Integrated Program Manager at PostMedia), Neal Bouwmeester (Senior Marketing Manager at Nissan), Rimi Singh (Brand Director at TBWA), Karena Phidd (Group Director of Strategy at OMD), Sean Dixon (Associate Director of Strategy at OMD) and moderator Nigel Newton (Layar Partner).

In the video, the panelists, all part of an innovative and extensive Nissan campaign, discuss using Layar nationwide in PostMedia’s Canadian newspapers to promote sales and test-drives of a new Nissan model. They all have some great things to say about Layar.

“At a bare minimum, to have them be able to look at the ad, then just engage with it - even for 30 more seconds, even for 20 more seconds - that’s golden,” said Bouwmeester. “You can’t buy that. Well, you can buy it now.”

The campaign was a big success - so big, in fact, that Nissan is submitting the campaign for an advertisement innovation award. Next month, after the campaign awards, we’ll have more we can share on this project, so keep an eye out for that. Nissan also announced that they intend to use Layar in a new upcoming campaign, but they were very “hush hush” about that as well.

Thanks again to the Dutch Embassy and the Netherlands Ambassador to Canada, Wim Geerts, for supporting and opening the event by talking about the rich history of Dutch technology innovation.

“We’re one of the world’s largest exporters of IT products and services, ranking fourth, behind the US, UK and Germany. Quite a feat, when you consider that these other three countries have significantly larger economies and populations,” said Geerts. “If you’ve ever listened to music, enjoyed wireless internet or used a wireless headset with your mobile phone, the chances are that you have been using technology that was developed by the Dutch.”