Making Advertising Interactive... With Camera Phones

from the a-step-in-the-right-direction... dept

Last year, there were stories about Japanese magazine publishers freaking out about "digital shoplifting" when women were using camera phones to snap pictures from inside fashion magazines and sending them to friends. It appears that some magazines are a bit more enlightened. Jane, the popular fashion/lifestyle magazine has realized that if people are taking pictures of the ads, that means they're paying attention to the ads and they might as well be rewarded for that. They're now offering prizes to readers who snap camera phone photos of their ads and send them back to the magazine. Yet another case where one company gets worked up about a new technology, while another figures out how to embrace it and improve their own situation. Who knows if this particular experiment will work, but it's another step towards realizing that advertising today needs to engage, not annoy, people.

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