The new tool of mobile marketing and sales for print publications: The smartphone
Advertisers are working tirelessly to make it easier for you to buy their products, and publishers to make their magazines more interactive. With the growing omnipresence of smartphones, an entire new realm of sales is becoming possible in print. The New York Times reports:
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.
Meanwhile, publishers using text-messaging programs to try to enliven their pages are packing information into the messages and using reader responses to calibrate their coverage.
Esquire Magazine is leading the move to integrate this techonology into its print issues. As The Times details:
In its March issue, Esquire will print Scanbuy codes in a spread on “The Esquire Collection” — “the 30 items a man would need to get through life,” said David Granger, editor in chief. Printed near each item will be a small code that looks like a group of black and white squares. Readers scan the code into an Internet-enabled phone, and the code takes them to a mobile menu that provides Esquire’s styling advice for the item and information on where to buy it.
An application called ScanLife, widely available online as a free download, turns a phone into a bar-code reader. Versions exist for the iPhone and BlackBerry as well as Android-based handsets, and the app comes preloaded on many Sprint phones in the United States. ScanLife can also read many standard bar codes on many phones, so it can perform price comparisons, for example.
“We kept hearing about different technologies that enabled people to close the gap between the inspiration of seeing something in a magazine and then going to do something about it,” Mr. Granger said.
You can read more on The New York Times.
There are new magazines popping up, just on smartphones.
First off nice post. Im not sure if it has been addressed, however when using Opera I can never get the whole webpage to load without refreshing many times. Maybe just my CPU. Thanks
Jesu Christ, consultants feuding it out? This is painful. Worse on Mo, but matches the Mculiffe campaign pretty well.
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The Man are out hunting for that just right web site , and the Women are just fine camping out with just one web site that cares about them being there, Women also feel safer on facebook then on other web site