CBS and Pepsi are
teaming up for a promotion
in an upcoming issue of
Entertainment Weekly
. When readers open to a two-page spread in the magazine, a tiny embedded video screen will flicker to life. Various buttons on the player will call up short promo clips from fall CBS shows, along with an ad for Pepsi Max.
The
Financial Times
compares
the stunt to a singing greeting card and to the moving pictures on the pages of the “Daily Prophet” (the newspaper read by characters in the Harry Potter series). The
FT
estimates the cost to build the video screen into magazines was “several dollars per copy.” Given this tremendous expense, CBS and Pepsi are placing the ad only in
EW
issues sent to subscribers in New York and Los Angeles—attempting to generate maximum buzz among TV freaks and entertainment-industry machers.
Ad Age
calls the promotion “intriguing,” and claims it demonstrates that marketers are “experimenting with new technologies to get their messages out to consumers.” A CBS marketing exec tells the
FT
that the ad is “part of the future—a way to engage consumers in new and surprising ways.”
Ah, so this is the bold new future, and a potential savior for dying print-magazine ad sales: a teensy, low-fi screen that costs a huge amount of money to distribute in just two cities and can only play a few short video clips. Fascinating! If only this screen could be larger and sharper and didn’t need to be shipped to people’s homes because they already owned one, and it could display an unlimited array of content that people could click on for more information, and it were incredibly easy and inexpensive to distribute that content onto screens in every corner of the world. Seems like the sort of futuristic idea advertisers might get really excited about sometime down the road. Until then, thank goodness for bold marketing innovations like this one.
