Printing Gets More Interactive

Strategy: Magazines Find Success With Interactive Content

Woman's Day magazine has gone beyond other magazines' advertising-focused experiments with digital interactivity by adding interactivity to its editorial pages as well, providing extra enticements for its print-edition readers. Pages adorned with an icon indicating that they are "snap-enabled" allow readers to digitally photograph them and send the images to a designated address in order to receive coupons, sample offers, or other promotions.

One of the magazine's advertisers, the large retail store Target, says it sold thousands of necklaces with the help of a snap-enabled editorial featuring the jewelry in Woman's Day's October issue, the first to be made interactive. Woman's Day is planning four interactive issues for this year, according to Carlos Lamadrid, senior vice president and chief brand officer for Woman's Day Brand Group.

"It allows advertisers to engage the reader in another way, and allows them to get a greater sense of return on investment," Lamadrid says.

In order to ensure that readers knew how to use the snap-enabled pages, sections at the front of the magazine were used to instruct them on how to use their mobile phone cameras to get offers and promotions, and the related advertising pages made clear what they would get in return for their photos.

Another magazine, GQ, used similar concepts last year for advertisers Gillette and Maserati, in which Gillette distributed samples of new products while Maserati was promoting a viral digital promotion of a study indicating that the sound of a Maserati engine creates a biological response in women.

Meanwhile, Coty has sought to build its brand resonance with women via a snap-enabled ad campaign for Gwen Stefani Harajuku fragrances by allowing readers to choose between a ringtone of Gwen Stefani music, a free sample, and a quiz to see the fragrance most suited to their personality, based around a set of characters inspired by fashionable girls in Tokyo's Harajuku district.

From "Magazines Find Some Success With Interactive Content"
AdAge.com (05/12/09) Chang, Rita

Europe: QR Spreads Its Reach

Already popular in Japan, two-dimensional bar codes that can be scanned by cellphones for instant access to information are starting to pop up in periodicals in Europe as well. The "QR" codes work by directing the Web browser on the cellphone to a site with information about related ads and promotions, and they are common in many magazines in Japan, with three-quarters of respondents to one Japanese poll saying they had used them.

Now, they have been appearing in the German tabloid Welt Kompakt and the Austrian magazine M, and a new magazine in the United Kingdom called Spektacle is printing QR codes with every article. Cellphone users can download the software needed for QR codes from various Web sites, and some cellphone vendors are starting to incorporate them by default.

In the future, the QR code idea could be coupled with the ability to pay for products by cell phone–already common in parts of Asia–to allow promotions such as beverage coupons with QR codes that a cellphone can scan and then present as full payment at a suitably equipped vending machine.

From "From the Page to the Internet, via Your Cell Phone"
Beyond Print (05/14/09) Alexander, G.

Source: Excerpts from the June 2009 PRINT World News