The Coming Age of Digital Magazines

I was a big fan of Josh Quittner when he was as Business 2.0. Heck, I was a big fan of Business 2.0. These days, Quittner blogs a lot about digital magazines, which is kind of like saying John Madden is doing some play by play for your local football team.

Here’s an interesting quote from a recent post:

I had one tiny epiphany I wanted to share, however. I was invited to attend an in-house conference at Richemont, the company that owns some of the world’s best-known luxury brands.

Throughout the day, the digital brand managers were showing off some of their Web-based projects and, as I watched some of the really gorgeous, cinematic stuff that they were doing, I realized that one day soon, these sorts of things will evolve from being Web pages to being the ad pages that adorn digital magazines.

This is actually a very big deal. It means that display advertising will work again.

Right now, the model doesn’t work because you have to go to, say, Van Cleef & Arpels’s website to see its ad. But what if the ad came to you, just as it does in a magazine. Only it’s way better than a magazine
because it’s animated and compelling. Imagine reading your favorite magazine on a tablet, and you hit this leopard (Now, on the Web, you’ve got to let it load first; that won’t be a problem on a downloaded e-mag.) How could you not stop and interact with it? Advertising will work so much better in the tablet-mag world.

Two things of note here: 1. Quittner obviously doesn’t read enough Nxtbooks to know what type of Ads many of you are doing. He should read our map. 2. Quittner points out that display ads in a delivered magazine are totally different than a web ad on a page waiting for someone to show up. And he’s absolutely right.