Contact: Digits, Widgets, and Print's Interactive Fidgets
Okay, so print hasn't had an instantaneous backchannel allowing consumers to affect content, or to have it individually addressed to them. But a variety of new technologies may close the digital gap altogether.
Take this magazine, for example. By the time you read these words, this article will be digitally distributed to tens of thousands more readers across the Internet. Likewise, you can instantly engage the author me electronically by linking to my byline and telling me via e-mail that, "Publishers have been adapting print content to the Web for more than a decade. What's so newsworthy about that?"
Well, if this column ended on that note, it wouldn't be. But Web publishing is one part of an inextricable link that's making all forms of media not just online, but tv, print, and even outdoor billboards digitally interactive. If you doubt that, ask the folks at Coca-Cola Co. or Carat Interactive about the "billboard" they erected in New York's Times Square. They call it a "digital interactive portal." It's capable of communicating directly to consumers via cell phones and over the Web, and adjusting its content accordingly. Those same technologies are being applied to print publishers in some interesting new ways. Not surprisingly, magazines are aiming this technology at the kind of readers who are apt to interact with a cell phone and multitask across different media young ones.
With its May issue, Hachette Filipacchi's teen magazine ellegirl will become the latest publication to offer marketers the ability to reach readers via mobile phone, using a technology created by Mobot. Readers will be able to use their camera phones to take photos of ads they're interested in and instantly send the digital images to Mobot, which will send them back promotions and information, such as locations where the products are sold, coupons, or free sample offers. This approach to digital print may sound familiar to survivors of the dot-com crash who remember Digital Convergence Corp., a once-hot Web player that developed the CueCat, a computer modem-like device that Internet-connected readers could use to scan codes in an ad or editorial content in a magazine to receive more information via the Web.
The next generation of digital print will come via a new "magnetic ink" technology that can literally print a microchip on a magazine or newspaper page, which can interact instantly with electronic devices nearby.
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