It should be no surprise to anyone that the print media is going through some issues. They have no money. It’s not really their fault, either. The trend of national and international companies buying local papers and expecting a big profit from them is fairly recent. Before that, papers tended to operate as loss leaders for local companies. (That’s a REALLY simplistic explanation of the problem. Please don’t assume I don’t understand the intricacies of the issue, I’m just a lazy typist.)
In an effort to be competitive with the web and TV, print is trying something new.
According to the BBC, the first video in print ads will appear in September in Entertainment Weekly in a few markets. They play some video (maybe audio too?) when you turn the page to see the ad screen, like opening one of those annoying-as-hell greeting cards that plays music.
The video-in-print ads will appear in select copies of the US show business title Entertainment Weekly.
The slim-line screens – around the size of a mobile phone display – also have rechargeable batteries.
The chip technology used to store the video – described as similar to that used in singing greeting cards – is activated when the page is turned.
Each chip can hold up to 40 minutes of video.
These things are hitting the L.A. and New York markets and nowhere else, but they are just too cool to not end up other places. Anyone wanna buy me a copy and ship it? I’ll post video of the magazine with the video playing inside. — Wow… how very surreal would that be?
I’ve actually got someone who just moved to the NY market. I’ve pinged them on FB to see if they see one they can send it to me.
I dunno if this will really seem to help the problem with local papers, or papers that are already struggling. The ads would be expensive, and I imagine that the only companies willing to put up that kinda money would want to put them in the strong national publications that already exist.
It sounds pretty cool, but it also sounds like it’ll make publications that are already faltering do worse.
It’s not something the papers are considering.
What THEY are looking at is a flat sheet like that works like the Kindle. What you’d do is buy a subscription, and the paper would be automatically downloaded to the sheet when you got near a wireless network. You could then store it for a while, read it when you liked, and delete it to make room for 2 or 3 other days worth of articles.
The video ad is going to be concentrated more on the magazine side of the industry, where their ad sales can support such an expenditure.