related magazines, but I couldn't find any. Then the December 2012 GQ
magazine caught my eye. It had Rihanna on the cover; who mysteriously
appears to be getting younger instead of older.
Anyway, I was flipping through the pages in search of the Rihanna so
that I could "read" the story. As you may know, magazines are designed
so that the story pages are physically shorter in width so that they
hide between the ad pages. Other way to put it; the ads are designed
to be seen above any article.
Since I couldn't avoid looking at the ads, I paid one of them more
attention than I wanted to. I noticed that the ad had a GQ Live app
marking on the page. Upon further investigating I found that the free
GQ Live app for Apple iOS and Android, would make certain pages come
alive. I couldn't wait to download the app to my iPhone 5 (luckily I
switched from Sprint to Verizon or I would have had to wait because
Sprint service does not work well at all in that store).
I downloaded the app fairly quickly and began trying the app and
magazine out. The app interface is simple; it looks like a basic
camera app. It uses the back camera on the device to "see" the image
on the magazine page. When it recognizes the image, it transforms the
page into a living video. This technology allows a stagnate picture to
provide much more information to the reader than it would otherwise.
Along with this, it obviously provides the advertiser with important
information that the normal page couldn't capture like whether a
reader viewed the page, at what point did the reader stop watching the
page, did the viewer stop viewing before the intended message was
provided.
Since the information is streaming from the Internet, it could be
modified to better convey the message. I noticed on GQ's website that
the streamed content does have a expiration date. Not sure why it
does, but I would guess it expires after the period that the
advertiser paid for it to be available.
The GQ live content appears to be made with advertising as the focus,
but their were article based "live" content. I was not able to check
it out at all because I had to find a flat surface to lay the magazine
out so that I could point the phone at it. The content pages that I
could find were about Rihanna and she nearly naked. How would that
have look to the other shoppers with me standing over a magazine with
my phone taking pictures of the young naked girl on the pages. Dirty
old man!
I didn't think I was old at 46, but the pictures of Rihanna made her
look like she was 18 or 19 years old. But I digress, the GQ Live work
very well. Some pages simply added a little video clip and included a
www icon that launched the appropriate website when touched. Others
literally made it appear as if the people or items on the page came
alive. It was very impressive.
I could imagine this technology being used for other magazines like
video game magazines that could better engage the reader and possibly
lead to more purchases of the gaming titles. Or how about viewing an
article that reviews a product like an iPad and then is able to allow
you to see the item in action? There are many uses for this
technology. Maybe the print medium can be revived with this or is this
just a temporary bridge until it all become totally digital?
What do you think?
Here are a couple of screen shots I grabbed:
Source : iamthereforeipad[dot]com
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