Spot the Difference in ROTHCO's New Campaign

Irish agency ROTHCO recently orchestrated a world first for print advertising by eliminating all the black spots in an entire printed national magazine.

The innovative campaign was to launch WiFi Calling, a new product that eliminates mobile phone coverage black spots by using wi-fi connections to boost your signal.

The agency took over the entire Irish Daily Mail Magazine, removing every single black spot to promote the new service for Ireland’s largest communications company, eir. Every full-stop, every semi-colon, every tittle on every ‘i’ and every ‘j’ was replaced with a colourful eir dot. Readers then found out the reason in a full-page advert at the back of the magazine.

“eir had a really unique product, that was perhaps a little bit complex to explain," says Stephen Rogers, CD at ROTHCO. "So, we created a really simple analogy for what WiFi Calling actually does, which is eliminates black spots. Once we had that, we pushed ourselves to bring it to life in the most surprising way we could.”

“We should also probably apologise to the designers in the Daily Mail," adds another of ROTHCO's CDs, Shane O’Brien, "[as they] had to sit up all night combing through the entire magazine replacing black dots, one by one.”