ALDI | Fresh Prints | 2018
The Morning Newsprint Stole Back Digital's Favorite Trick / ALDI "Fresh Prints"
I always thought "real-time" was a digital-only thing. But at 7am, vegetables wrapped in newspaper were delivered to homes across Spain, wrapped together with that very day's latest news. A comeback move where print media proved it could capture "freshness in this exact moment."
The problem
In Spain, Aldi was a relatively unknown supermarket, and almost nobody knew it carried fresh food. This was despite the fact that it actually sourced excellent quality produce locally and sold it at low prices. In Spanish households, fresh food makes up 52.1% of grocery purchases, bought 251 times a year compared to just 144 times for canned and jarred goods. In a market like that, this lack of awareness was fatal. Fresh food is the very reason people choose a supermarket, and the driver that brings them back again and again — so this was a battle Aldi couldn't afford to lose.
The insight
Newspapers are the most traditional media, yet they're updated every single day. That's what they focused on. Just as news is "fresh," so is Aldi's produce. The core of this campaign was the idea of using real-time delivery — something that seemed like digital's exclusive territory. To challenge the mistaken belief that many consumers held, that Aldi didn't carry fresh food, McCann Spain brought a very modern idea into a traditional print campaign. Proving "newness" through newspaper, the "old medium" — there's something beautiful about the structure that makes this contradiction work.
The idea
In Spain's traditional markets, there's a custom of wrapping goods in newspaper, so they created a special advertising page in the newspaper and used that very newspaper to wrap the products. But here's the twist: the ad page printed the same content as the actual news story on the left-hand page, mirrored on the right-hand page — so the products ended up wrapped in that day's most current news. Working with newspaper publishers, they had the latest news fed to them right before the printing presses stopped, so the ad page was created in real time. Two major news stories were used: Rafael Nadal winning the Barcelona Open, and Pyongyang announcing the shutdown of its nuclear facility. At 7am, the message "Fresh every day" arrived directly in people's hands, wrapped in the newspaper itself — the "freshest thing" of that day.
What happened
At 7am on Monday, April 30, 2018 (4/30), the newspapers were distributed across all of Spain, reaching over 1 million households. They chose media that led in their respective cities: 20 Minutos, which averages 440,000 readers in Madrid alone, and La Vanguardia, the best-selling newspaper in Barcelona with 610,000 daily readers. At the 2018 Cannes Lions, the campaign won a Gold Lion in the Media category (Use of Print / Outdoor) and a Silver Lion in Print & Publishing, becoming one of Spain's most successful campaigns. It was the result of a tight deadline and coordination across different organizations bearing fruit.
Afterthought
To all the talk of "old media is dead" — newspaper just delivered the best comeback. Real-time delivery, something thought to be digital's exclusive domain, was pulled off with physical paper and ink. And it fit perfectly into the context of Spain's traditional market culture. This was also a victory of teamwork — an agency, media company, and client coming together in an incredibly short window of time. Waiting until right before the presses stopped, printing the latest news, and delivering it all by 7am. That tightness, that speed, that tension. Digital isn't the only thing that can be fast. With enough drive, even a newspaper can deliver "right now." That's exactly what this campaign proved.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2018
