The iPad: Magazines Reinvented.
Have you got one?
Planning on getting one?
I’d bet you’d find a few good first generation iPads for sale on eBay if you can’t afford the iPad2.
Heres’ a pretty good primer from AdAge on what tablet computing means for marketers:
http://adage.com/article/digital/ipad-s-slick-features-marketers/149172/
But you’re better off starting by thinking about what they mean for consumers — i.e. subscribers and readers.
A good way to start is to just think it’s like your favourite magazine — but with a little bit of magic hidden inside.
It’s the same size as a magazine, weighs the same as a magazine, and you can flip the pages like a magazine. It has gorgeous full colour resolution like a magazine — better, I opine, than you can get in CMYK.
And you can carry it from room to room like a magazine, settling into your favourite chair and thumbing through the pages. Once again, it has become a tactile experience. And don’t give me that bullshit about the smell of newsprint. Buy a bottle of printer’s ink and pour it into a vaporizer if it’s that important to you. =)
And here’s what it also doesn’t have, thank god:
There’s heaps of great mags you can subscribe to — I get Vanity Fair, Esquire, National Geographic, Wired…
Sadly, most advertisers don’t get it.
And neither do the publishers.
And 90% of the ads are flat graphics.
They sit there and look pretty, just like the bad old days.
The 10% that do have interactivity really pop. You can:
The choice is yours.
Sadly, few take advantage of the fact that iPads are also online — so, should the impulse take you, you can:
Get an iPad, subscribe to your favourite zine and note the good, the bad and the ugly in this month’s issue.
All the bads, all the uglies — and, sadly, most of the goods — still have a long way to go. Every same-as-last-century ad is a potential client screaming for someone with a digital brain to give their flat, boring, static ads an interactive makeover. Go forth and codify.
