Men's Health's Effort To Led Magazine and Mobile

Another effort to meld the magazine world with the online/mobile, this time through a lowly camera phone instead of dedicated contraptions like the failed Cuecat. Men's Health, part of Rodale, is planning a June/July issue, where every ad in the issue will be camera-phone ready, sort of. Consumers who use their cellphones to take pics of ads, then send it back to the magazine as an MMS, will get promotional bounce-backs from marketers. In this case, the ads do not need to have special barcodes, and the user's camera doesn't need any special software, the AdAge story says. Men's Health plans to try SnapTell's image-recognition technology for this.

Advertisers including Axe, Westin, Powerade and Samsung are talking with the magazine about this issue. Replies can take a variety of forms, including coupons for price deductions, price information, ringtones, wallpaper, games and contest entries. Tough to see it working for everyone, though: more commercial mags such as Lucky might be more successful at this than others