Every Print Ad Has Mobile Interactivity In New Issue of Men's Health

Thanks Branding Unbound, for this follow up on the launch of the first totally interactive print mag

It's finally here: The new issue of Men's Health is hitting newsstands and making history at the same time.

Back in April, I posted about how every ad in the July/August issue of Rodale's Men's Health title will enable readers to snap pics of the ads using their mobile phones and send to SnapTell to get instant promotional responses from marketers.

Now, the issue is hitting the street, and is being billed as the "first fully interactive advertising magazine" in American magazine history.

According to SnapTell, the technology is compatible with all camera phones, does not require special software for downloading advertiser images and is an opt-in solution for the reader.

“As technology continues to proliferate our everyday lives and devices become more advanced we are always looking for innovative ways to stay competitive in the industry,” says Jack Essig, VP/Publisher of Men’s Health in a statement. “[This approach seems] easy and appealing to our readers, yet compelling and novel to our customers.”

There's even a built-in mechanism for promoting reader/advertiser interaction. Each "Snap and Send" enters readers into a drawing to win a trip for two to the Wyndham Rio Mar Beach, Golf, Casino and Spa resort in Puerto Rico for 5 days and 4 nights plus round-trip airfare. And three runners up will win brand new iPhones.

Some of the nearly 100 advertisers participating in the July/August issue include AT&T, Anheuser-Busch, Honda Motors, Louis Vuitton, Quaker Oats, The Coca-Cola Company, Procter & Gamble and Unilever USA.

As I write in BRANDING UNBOUND the book, this is the future of print magazine publications (with or without the "snap a photo and send it" model), and a view of how mobile marketing works best - as a interaction mechanism to commercial messages we experience in print, broadcast, outdoor, direct mail and more.

In this particular case, the initiative offers a great deal of flexibility for marketers to provide instant brand messaging, sales incentives such as product samples and discounts, sweepstakes information, and links to websites, photos and videos.

To be clear, this is hardly the first such initiative to bring this kind of interactivity to American publications.

Jane, for instance, is just one of the U.S. publications that long ago started enabling readers to interact with brands by snapping and sending ad images.

And just in the last few months, Wenner Media's Rolling Stone started offering similar mobile marketing solutions for groups of advertisers in an issue.

But this is perhaps the most expansive to date, in that it includes every ad in an issue, and is promoted throughout on behalf of every advertiser therein.

Kudos to Rodale and SnapTell for giving us a, er, snapshot of tomorrow's print pub, today.

Read more, here.