Pictures that move, not moving pictures

Ok... i'm not about to buy an iPad anytime soon, but thinking like this does make the format seem way cool

VIV Mag Interactive Feature Spread - iPad Demo from Alexx Henry on Vimeo.

No leave, no life

It’s official – Australians are just no good at taking holidays. Thanks to Smart Company for letting us know.

A new study of Australia’s holiday habits by the Federal Government’s Tourism Australia organisation has revealed that nearly 60% of full time workers will not use their full four weeks of leave this year and have eight weeks accrued.

Men aged between 35 and 49 have the biggest leave balances, despite the fact that half of them have children under 12 years of age.

According to Tourism Australia’s calculations, Australians have a total of 121 million days of annual leave owing, which equates to a leave bill of $31 billion for the business community.

Tourism Australia has used the research to launch its “No leave, no life” campaign to encourage workers to take leave and hopefully stimulate the struggling tourism market.

Now piss off and go get some rays.

Glamour.TV

Thanks to Adage for this post.

Glamour Rolls Out Web-Video Platform With Key Advertisers
Conde Nast Title Ventures Further Into Branded Content

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Three years after launching its groundbreaking "Reel Moments" short-film series, Glamour continues to branch out in the realm of branded entertainment.

Earlier this week, the Conde Nast fashion title introduced Glamour.TV, a new web-video platform aimed at expanding Glamour content into bite-sized video clips, customized to key advertisers.

Looks are everything
Dockers, for example, is the sponsor of "Moms Working It," a show that interviews celebrity mothers such as Jennie Garth, Solange Knowles and Nikki Taylor. Revlon is the presenting sponsor of "Beauty Wars," a makeover competition series, hosted by "Entourage" co-star Debi Mazar, in which makeup artists from around the world strive to create the consummate look for the American woman. There's also "The List," a fashion and entertainment news show, hosted by model Molly Sims and E!'s Giuliana Rancic, that is co-sponsored by Estee Lauder and Burberry.

Bill Wackermann, senior VP-publishing director of Glamour, said the model is reminiscent of the TV-sponsorship model of the 1950s. "It harkens back to when advertisers were in the business of promoting their own shows, promoting their brands and having more creative control of the process."

(To highlight the vintage ad model, Glamour this week literally trotted out the vintage by sending waiters to its top ad clients in New York with champagne and TV dinners prepared by Kurt Gutenbrunner, the Austrian chef of uber-trendy West Village bistro Wallse.)

Glamour.TV is the second video site of its kind to emerge from a Conde Nast fashion title in the past year, following last year's late-summer launch of ShopVogue.TV (now Vogue.TV). Both magazines have taken an aggressive stance on owning their own content online at a time when everyone from Elle to Marie Claire is partnering with TV networks for reality TV projects.

An image to maintain
"We've been approached on almost every one of those deals for a reality show. You pick the program -- magazine partners are always being asked to participate," Mr. Wackermann said. "But that becomes about their show and their brand vs. ours, and if you have a small brand you may benefit from being associated with that show. But Glamour reaches 12.8 million women; our brand is larger than the audience that watches those shows at any given time. For us, when we do something to extend our brand into different media, it has to be what is relevant to our consumer and our brand."

Glamour is also experiencing growth in year-over-year web traffic going into the launch of Glamour.TV, an encouraging sign that the site could find a sizeable audience early on. Since July 2007, Glamour.com's monthly traffic has increased 118% to 862,708 users, according to ComScore. Its Conde Nast sibling, Vogue.TV, also reached a viewership milestone earlier this week when "Model.Live," an original series co-distributed by social-networking site Bebo, passed the 1 million view, or video streams, mark after five episodes. In just two weeks "Model.Live" drew enough traffic to Vogue.TV to send its unique viewer stats past the 1 million mark as well, having accumulated 900,000 users since launching in August 2007.

Said Vogue Publisher Tom Florio of the site's economic model, "We want to make sure clients get the print, that we're not giving away the business like everyone else out there. [But if a client] moves 10% of their budget to the internet, we want to show them where the tonnage is coming from. ... You've got everyone in Hollywood trying to suck money out of this business, so we want to work together exclusively with advertisers online, or package together with pages."

Guest stars
Mr. Wackermann said Glamour.TV's first season will carry through October, when the latest installment of "Glamour Reel Moments" will also appear on Glamour.com. On tap for this year's short films are directors Demi Moore and Courteney Cox, featuring stars such as Rumer Willis (Ms. Moore's daughter), Anna Faris and Laura Dern.

Glamour is also actively in talks with the major video distributors to help syndicate Glamour.TV content online. Vogue.TV already has deals in place with Hulu, TiVo, Tidal TV, Veoh and JuiceCaster.

Click on this link for the original article: http://adage.com/madisonandvine/article?article_id=130923

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.