With the explosive growth in online advertising and native advertising over the past several years, it’s no surprise that ad agencies are beginning to churn out interactive advertisements for their newest and most dynamic products available. With consumer engagement being placed on a pedestal in the stimulus-filled digital age, highly interactive ads aren’t too surprising when they crop up online. But that changes rather quickly when they show up in an unexpected medium: print.
Subscribers and avid readers of popular tech magazine WIRED will be in for a treat when they open up January’s issue and find what is arguably the most unique magazine advertisement ever in front of them.
The ad is for Motorola’s new Moto X, its flagship Android smartphone. The ad will emphasize the phone’s highly customizable nature, featuring a center-set Moto X and 12 small colored dots that run along the bottom of the ad. By pulling out a small tab on the side of the magazine, the reader can activate the ad. Then, they can change the color of the phone by touching each of the dots.
This effect is achieved through the combination of three LED lights, a sheet of Plexiglas, four cell batteries, 12 buttons that correspond to the 12 colored dots that determine the color of the displayed smartphone.
Only 150,000 copies of the magazine that contain the ad will be physically available and they will be spread between New York and Chicago. In order to appease the general interest surrounding this new advertisement, Motorola has released several teasers on YouTube that highlight the general basics of the ad.
Although this is a one-off ad, appealing primarily for its novelty, it has the potential to revitalize a dying medium. Print circulation is unquestionably decreasing for most major publications. For many, the allure of flipping through a few pages pales in comparison to the Internet’s ability to offer rich and diverse forms of media with a few swipes of the finger or clicks of a mouse. By offering new forms of interactive media within the confines of a traditional print outlet, WIRED may have stumbled upon a method of injecting some life back into the world of print. For now, the company can be content that its incredibly revolutionary ad will generate huge buzz not only for the Moto X, but for the publication as well.
