Entertainment Weekly magazine has published the first ever video advert inside a printed magazine. The ad is for Pepsi, and features a TV style commercial on a screen embedded in a cardboard insert.

Pepsi are lauding this as “an extraordinary way to refresh how we interact with consumers”. It looks to me like an extraordinary waste of time, and more importantly – resources.

I’ve not seen the ad in the flesh, however I did see a similar experiment that Esquire published on their front cover in October last year. On first sight it looked different and grabbed your focus – but when you picked it up it felt unnatural and completely out of place.

When you see the chunky circuit board inserts required to get video in to our magazines, and consider that they increase the production cost of the magazine to around $20 (or £13), you have to ask WHY?

In a world where consumers are fast moving away from printed media and are going online for their news, this seems like a gimmicky attempt to take video, which has worked fantastically on the web, and shoe-horn it in to a traditional medium which it simply isn’t suited to. It’s a big (chunky) square peg in a round hole!

Sure – this ad has grabbed the headlines, but if video advertising were to catch on in the printed media, just think of the environmental impact. How many people are going to remove the video screens and recycle them when they throw the magazine away? How many others won’t put the magazine in with their paper recycling because the insert can’t be recycled with the paper? A lot of magazines and video screens would end up in landfill.

Our PCs, Macs and smartphones are designed for video advertising. It’s comparitavely cheap to get it there, it’s easy for us to share (helping online video ads to go viral) and it helps advertisers to genuinely “interact with our customers”, in a way that Pepsi is not coming near by sticking a big fat screen in to a magazine.

Yes – this new ad has grabbed our attention, and there will be a lot of newspaper columns filled by it (with text, not video!). However the very reason it’s grabbed the headlines is that video in magazines is out of place – and long may it stay that way.

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course, Entertainment Weekly, Environment, Magazine, News, Pepsi, podcasting course, Podcasting Training, training, Video Advert, video for web course, video for web training

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