# Café and pub history placemats and table cards (one story per table)

date: 2026-11-01 (skills harvest ~00:30Z). topic: a printed local-history surface on café/pub tables (paper placemat, table card / table tent, or beer mat) carrying one short, sourced story and a QR to the matching site page. Status for Cedwyn: proposal (print + venue approaches need the owner's GO; zero spend from us).

## What the sources show (read unless marked)
- **Free sponsored-placemat model (Adsrus "The Placemat People", vendor page, read).** Full-colour paper placemats are free to the restaurant because "the advertising around the border pays for the mat"; the venue's name sits in the centre; remaining border slots go to "non-competing local businesses"; the back can carry "games, promos, coupons, or history of your restaurant"; basic run **5,000 mats**. This is the long-running small-town placemat economics: border ads pay the print. Vendor terms, not a result.
- **Keepsake evidence (Facebook group "East Auroran", post read in title only).** A resident is "on a mission to track down one of the paper placemats used for years at The Globe Restaurant (with the local town history and sketches)". Testimony that a town-history placemat is remembered and sought years later; no numbers.
- **Heineken "Pub Museums" (Ireland; LePub/Publicis Dublin; titles and snippets only, pages blocked).** Historic pubs got a plaque with a QR outside and on artefacts inside; the scan opens the pub's history and local legends. Shows a national brand treating pub history as content worth scanning. No scan figures obtained; not checked.
- **Indie York coasters (Instagram, 2025, snippet only).** "We've got our own Beer Mats!" placed in independent pubs to send drinkers to an independents campaign. Pattern only; no numbers.
- **Print-format logic (4OVER4 printer guide, read).** Menu = the full list; a table tent "sells exactly one thing" to a guest already seated; a QR card "carries no content at all, only a link to a page you control", so the content changes without reprint. Failure mode stated: no signal or a guest who will not scan leaves nothing, so the printed face must work alone.
- **What was not found:** no published scan-rate or sales figure for a history placemat or table card. Any number we report must be our own counts.

## The method, step by step
1. **Pick the surface by venue type.** Café with paper mats: A3 placemat (one side story + small map, reverse optional for a sponsor strip). Pub: beer mat (95 mm, one story, one QR) or a folded table card. Venues with neither: an A6 table card in a stand.
2. **One story per surface.** 60-120 words, one dated record line ("1840 tithe map: ..."), one picture (period map or drawing we hold rights to). The face must read well with no scan.
3. **QR to one internal page, one code per venue** (own redirect with venue tag), so counts per venue are real. The page is the matching parcel/story page, with the walk and /ebooks/ further down; never a hard sell on the mat.
4. **Pay nothing:** either the venue prints (they already buy mats/coasters) with our artwork, or 2-3 border slots for non-competing local businesses cover print (sponsor pays printer direct), as in the sponsor-a-stop skill.
5. **Series, not one-off.** 4-6 different stories so tables differ and regulars collect; reprint only the ones that get scanned.
6. **Measure honestly:** scans per venue per week, copies used, and anything the staff hear. Report counts only; no invented footfall.
7. **Season review:** after 8-12 weeks keep the venues with scans, swap stories, drop the rest.

## How we apply it to Cedwyn
- Venues: cafés and pubs on or near the Llandough heritage walk and in Penarth (research list only, from their public pages). Bilingual face (Welsh and English) like the walk leaflet.
- Story set (from evidence pages only, neutral wording, each with its record line): the name forms (Tŷ Mawr / Tymawr / Great House Farm, see /nomenclature/); the parish of Llandough-juxta-Penarth; the tithe-map field names; the old village layout. **Llandough Farm is not Great House Farm.** No court-case story on a table surface; the case lives on the site, not on a dinner table.
- QR per venue goes to the matching parcel page ("NN of 59") under the Wales scope; the page links to the walk and to /ebooks/.
- Artwork made in-house from images we hold rights to; no insignia; never name the owner's family members or any living descendant; no banned words.
- Pairs with: local-business-sponsor-a-stop-printed-walk-leaflet.md (sponsor strip economics), shop-window-history-trail-stamped-map.md (venue network), parish-community-magazines-local-print-vale.md (price anchor).
- **Gates:** every venue approach is a HubSpot hive draft task only, sent on the owner's GO; zero spend from us; nothing posted or printed without GO.
- Next action (no GO needed): draft 4 story texts (bilingual, sourced) and one A3/beer-mat layout spec as files in the project workspace, plus a HubSpot draft task "[BIZDEV] Table stories: placemat/beer-mat series (draft)".

## Sources
- theplacematpeople.com (read; vendor)
- facebook.com (title read)
- lbbonline.com (blocked; snippet only)
- adsoftheworld.com (blocked; snippet only)
- instagram.com (snippet only)
- 4over4.com (read; printer guide)