Esquire’s Battery-Powered Cover The Last Gasp Of Printed Media?
My vote for the most deluded advertiser of the month goes to Michael Maguire, the CEO of Structural Graphics for his ideas on the future of print magazines.
If you haven’t already seen it or heard about it, the October issue of Esquire is “battery-powered”. Yeah, it’s just as tacky as it sounds. It cost Esquire $250,000 dollars just to get the technology to do it and it falls completely flat. I think it may just signify the jumping of the shark for print media as a whole, or maybe not, who knows.
Michael Maguire had some pretty lofty things to say about it though, like the cover was “heralding a new era in the use of technology in magazine advertising”, and he played the futurist, saying that “there are a number of steps that we’re going to see unfolding in the years to come… like animated color video in printed media, etc”. I’m not so sure. People may cling to magazines the way we’ve clung to books, but I think it’s just as likely that some sort of product like the Amazon Kindle could become mainstream and people could buy magazines for their Kindle and download them directly. Who needs paper, anyway?
What do you think AdSavvyites? Esquire’s electro-cover, lame or not?
3 comments
The technology is pretty cool actually.
The technology _is_ kinda cool, but that flashing banner on the cover reminds of animated GIFs. Has the print media finally made it to the nineties?
Who needs magazines when blogs (over all, pro ones) give almost the same?
It would be much more worthy using this tech to connect the net to the real world in a simple way.
Magazines get a huge amount of money from advertisement, that could be enough to keep the machine on if you downsize costs to max. How? E-paper. In some years, when a e-paper readers cost go lower and lower, its not gonna be any problem to buy one that you can use actually like now you use a book, roughly. You throw it, keep it in weird places, it gets wet, you step on it, and much more worse thigns. When e-paper can stand that threat, and keep on showing images, then is the moment.
Newspaper and mazines are “exclusive information” sellers. Many people use them because you can find exclusive researches and you can threat it way much worse than a laptop, and its more comfortable to read in it.
Let the kids be kids, let the mazines focus on info.
Who can get a plexible e-paper, really resistant, and as batteryless as a 1985 casio watch, will have the whole magazine business in his hands. Wireless is optional, not so necessary, you can adapt withdrawal machines connectors (those little rounded for external keyboard) to make a purchase system in a lower cost way.
Evolving is the way, we cannot change at once, we can just make little steps in a direction we wanna take.
By the way… squire epaper number was so so so exciting
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