Wednesday, August 25, 2004

Trying to save interruption advertising

According to this post on Adrants, Jane Magazine has started a promotion where readers can earn prizes by using their camera phones to take pictures of ads that appear in the magazine and send them back to the magazine.  I guess this allows the magazine to tell advertisers not only the number of impressions an advertisement may have made based on subscription and newsstand sales, but also gives them an additional metric to report back on.  My point is this: Being able to report on the number of people that take a picture of an ad wouldn't convince me that people were really seeing the ad; prove to me that a camera phone picture of an ad is producing a $3 return to a $1 advertising investment.

As a side to note to interruption advertising in magazines: Those stupid new Virgin Atlantic tear out advertisements drive me nuts!  Not only are the huge and bulky, but they leave behind a strip of stiff cardboard that's been bound into the spine of the magazine that, unless removed, causes the pages behind it to fold around all weird.  It's bad enough that you've stuck this massive ad in the magazine, but I can understand the economics of the magazine business; what pisses me off is that when I remove that ad, it is not really fully removed and impacts my reading experience until I spend even more time to remove the strip.  Grrrr.

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