Volkswagen is the latest in a number of large automakers to add Augmented Reality and Interactive Print to its marketing strategy. Similar to Nissan Canada’s print takeover from 2012, Volkswagen has launched a sizable newspaper ad campaign in its home country of Germany with Interactive Print enhancements placed front-and-center.

A full twelve-page advertisement in Welt am Sonntag (Germany’s largest Sunday newspaper) shows off the new high-tech features of the 2015 Volkswagen Passat with videos that play right off the page when scanned with the Layar App. Additionally, readers can play with an interactive widget using Layar to view the new Passat with their own choice of color and rim style.

In total, the ads will be part of a circulation of over 400,000 newspapers. The pages have also been compiled into a brochure that will be distributed to every German Volkswagen dealership, as well as select business hotels including Radisson, Grand City Hotel, and Holiday Inn. Over 164,000 copies of the booklet are initially being shared.

The campaign was produced by Volkswagen’s German advertising agency Grabarz & Partner, with digital content production by Mackevision and zweiteHeimat. Limebizz, an Advanced Layar Partner, was employed to help with the AR and Interactive Print items.

So far the campaign has been a success, including some attention from the local press. To give it a try yourself, scan these examples with the Layar App.

Newspapers around the globe – from national dailies to local weeklies – are using Interactive Print to boost revenue and reader engagement. Given this growth, we thought it was a great time to share our insights on how AR adds value to this industry.

Yesterday we hosted another of our popular webinars in which our North American Director of Business Development Nigel Newton detailed how Interactive Print can benefit the newspaper industry. We also shared great Interactive Print examples from papers all over the world.

These included the Toronto Star and Glacier Media from Canada, De Volkskrant and Wegener Media from the Netherlands, Folio Magazine from the United States and Lancashire & North West from the United Kingdom, among several others.

To accompany to the webinar, we’ve created a Newspaper Industry Overview, which dives into trends, methods and the 6 business benefits of Interactive Print for newspapers. Visit our Layar for Newspapers page to download the overview and to download the slides and recording of the webinar!

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!