Magazines

Print magazine and newspaper ads are becoming more interactive with the addition of interactive bar codes and icons that, when read or snapped with a mobile phone, provide the consumer with product info, a promotion, or a coupon.

"With the sudden ubiquity of smartphones, which have apps that can read bar codes, and cameraphones, which can easily snap pictures of icons, magazines like Esquire and InStyle are adding interactive graphics to their articles, while Entertainment Weekly and Star are including them in ads," The New York Times reported.

Examples of interactive print campaigns:

• In its March 2010 issue, Esquire will print Scanbuy codes in a spread on “the 30 items a man would need to get through life.” Printed with each item will be a small code that readers scan with an Internet-enabled phone, and the code will provides Esquire’s styling advice for the item and information on where to buy it.
  
  
• In its March 2010 issue, InStyle is "using photographs of clothes as the key that links print and online." InStyle will run a “clothes we love” article, and will direct readers to hold up the magazine's pages featuring these clothing items to their web cameras. The browser will then open 3-D videos showing "how to pull outfits together, how to take it from day to night, how to take it from work to weekend.”
  
  
• ESPN The Magazine has been accompanying featured products and ads with text-messaging codes from a company called Snipp. Readers transmit the code to S-N-I-P-P, along with their e-mail address, and receive an e-mail reply providing more information or special offers.
  

Getting consumers to understand how to use them is still a challenge, however. "Publishers can print bar codes to their hearts’ content, but getting consumers to understand and use them is another matter. While bar codes are integrated into everyday life in countries like Japan — people get nutrition information from bar codes on McDonald’s hamburger wrappers — American consumers have never quite picked up the habit. And now that search engines are fast and accurate, advertisers and publishers will most likely need to offer something spectacular, not just a plain Web page, to get people to bother scanning anything."

Source:  The New York Times, From Print to Phone to Web. And a Sale?, January 10, 2010.