May 13, 2026

The Daily Rind | Say Cheese

Print Ads Are Dead; Long Live Print Ads

Print advertising is dead.

So when The Daily Rind — Canada's preeminent cheesy tabloid (owned and operated by the curd nerds at Say Cheese) — asked us to help create ads for actual paying advertisers in their wonderfully unhinged publication, we said yes!

The Problem:

Print is dead. Everyone says so. And yet, every six months, 10,000+ copies of The Daily Rind hit 25+ coveted locations across Calgary — read by turophiles, foodies and influencers who still appreciate the smell of fresh ink almost as much as a perfectly aged Comté.

The Challenge:

Ads aren't funny anymore. They're targeted, optimized, A/B tested and squeezed through a content calendar until every last drop of personality has been pasteurized out of them.

That is decidedly not what The Daily Rind is about.

And we weren't creating an ad. We were creating several — for several different businesses, each with their own brand, their own voice, their own sense of humour and their own appetite for risk.

Every ad needed to feel right at home next to headlines like "Nostradamus Predicts Cheese Parma-geddon" while still doing the one thing an ad is technically supposed to do: sell something.

How We Did It:

We worked directly with the publication and each individual business — translating between brand guidelines and barnyard humour, between "please keep it on-brand" and "please make it weirder." Every ad was concepted, written and designed to live inside The Daily Rind's universe without losing the advertiser's voice.

In short: we worked with the publication and a bunch of very good sports to really stink up the joint.

It worked. Aged to perfection, in fact.

See The Work:

Ready to stink up your own joint?

Contact: https://itsdigital.ca/

More on The Daily Rind: https://saycheeseyyc.com/the-daily-rind/

More on Say Cheese: https://saycheeseyyc.com/

Back to Our Work: https://itsdigital.ca/our-work/

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