Strictly from a content point of view, I’ve always been an Esquire Magazine fan. When I was in college back there during the Reagan administration it was held up as the journalist’s magazine, kind of like Little Feat was a musician’s band, or Cormac McCarthy was a writer’s writer. If you could write for Esquire, you did the University of New Hampshire proud. Throughout the years Esquire has fought the good fight, even if they did drop short stories. It has, however, thrown some very weak punches at digital publishing. Until its last issue that is.
Its "augmented reality" has already been fed to the hard-to-impress digirati blogosphere where it has been met with a resounding “what’s next?” First, if you’re not familiar with how it works, the print pages have barcodes and other icons on them that interact with a webcam via customer designed software and a webcam to interact with the pages being viewed and get access to 3D animated video content. So hold the barcode up to your webcam and a special website will show cover boy Robert Downey Jr. as he intros the issue and throws in a plug for his new movie Sherlock Holmes. Regardless of how the technology works or who it impresses this experience is immersive. It’s innovative. It’s a lot to read, a lot to look at, a lot to talk about and a lot to look forward. It is in short everything most print magazines are not. It is also one of the most innovative uses of digital publishing technology I’ve seen.
The new old eBay: Among the pages in the Esquire is the first evidence that eBay is auctioning off its future. What eBay users always aspired to, I think, was that they were finding secrets. They wanted to discover a great deal. If eBay users wanted the cheapest stuff they would have gone to WalMart or Overstock, they would have. So now eBay is pitching itself as the place to find last year’s MP3 player or last year’s plasma screen TV. The tagline: “Come to think of it.” Bad idea.
Blindsided. I’m all for branded content. Having said that, I’m also all for subtlety. After sitting through a weekend of football I’m convinced that the force with which the new Sandra Bullock feel-good football movie is not the way to integrate content. By last night I expected the play-by-play announcers to work “blindsided” into every defensive comment.
