Interactive Print?
By Jeff Hilimire on Thursday, October 11th, 2007Thinking back to the days of taking the SAT (did you hear they allow calculators now?!), I remember the analogy questions and I could imagine seeing this one:
Cat is to Dog as
Interactive is to…
a) Digital
b) Online
c) Print
d) Al Gore
The obvious answer would be c), right? Not so fast. I just read about a company called Structural Graphics that creates what they call “interactive print”. In an article by Mediaweek, the author writes about pitches that Structural Graphics has recently made on the concept of print ads with animation, sound and video to Time Inc. and other major publishers. The printed page would even have a coin-sized battery!
Although they say the product is about two years away from execution, you have to start thinking that we’re not too far off from having conversion-enabled (I just made that word up) print ads that connect to the web, possibly through bluetooth on your phone or a wireless network. Or I could see ads change based on when a person is reading that magazine (i.e. if there is an NFL ad for an upcoming game and you read the magazine two weeks later, the ad could refresh to the game that weekend).
This kind of technology leads me to believe that soon all marketing will be “interactive”. I was at a dinner the other night and someone high up on the interactive side at one of the largest companies in town made the comment that interactive marketing is now traditional marketing. And I think she’s right.
Jeff - Very interesting concept. During the making of the movie, “Minority Report” starring Tom Cruise, they hired futurist to assist in creating how the world, including advertising, would be in the year 2054.
I’ve done some research, but hadn’t run across Structural graphics. In the movie, they show newspapers and cereal boxes just as you described, all using nanotechnology. The newspaper in the movie is based on theory that you can create a nano particle printer and actually print the particles onto a surface.
Take a look at this clip from Youtube in case you or some of your readers have not seen the movie. (The first 25 seconds is all you really need to see)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCQpMT_iL9U
If you take a closer look at the newspaper, it has headlines that read “Molecular Nanotechnology.” And it updates with the latest news as well.
Great technology, I would love to see the tool that integrates search, TV, radio and print all in one bid or ad serving tool. We can finally see which tactic caused or contributed to conversion.
Why stop at ‘print’. This may be way off, but last night on CSI: New York, the criminals wore suits that contained microchips and electric grids that could tap into network APs and download information. Who’s to say that the techonology you talk about here couldn’t also be ‘fitted’ for other industries?. We may someday, literally, be walking advertisements…
Good point, Cindy. But, aren’t humans already walking advertisements? Think professional boxing, and the companies that pay people to tattoo their bodies with adverts.
Ah, yes. But those are static - just like print. Imagine a tee-shirt that has a ‘video’ of a commercial rather than just the brand name silk-screened on.