Okay, print advertisers just upped the ante by a few chips.
Motorola got a little crazy with their ad in January’s Wired magazine. As you probably know, Motorola’s big thing now is to allow customers to create their own customized phones, basically turning buyers into would-be designers.
In their print ad, they’ve managed to take the concept to print, allowing readers to change the color of the phone on the paper by touching the controls at the bottom of the page.
As David Gianatasio says in AdWeek, “Whether you think it’s a long-awaited ad hybrid or just a high-cost gimmick, this upcoming interactive print ad for Motorola’s Moto X is definitely pushing people’s buttons.”
The paper-does-digital concept has been building for a while now (we showed you what Disney is doing to paper back in October with self-charging substrates and LED lights). Now Digitas and Motorola have brought the hybrid idea to market via wafer-thin LEDs, batteries and a pseudo-keyboard.
Critics of this kind of innovation will say it’s too expensive to bring to the mass market (this ad is being distributed in just over 150,000 copies of Wired in Chicago and New York), and it’s nothing but a whiz-bang gimmick. Others, like Todd Wasserman of Mashable, applaud the innovation in this and other print ads of late.
Let the debate rage about whether this is “truly innovative or just a stunt that would be too expensive to be widely replicated in print,” as Gianatasio writes. One thing is clear. Print’s future as a valid medium of choice in the digital world seems secure.
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