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Sports Illustrated Swimsuit

March 14, 2012 by · Comments Off on Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 

Sports Illustrated Swimsuit, Once I saw that Sports Illustrated was releasing its annual swimsuit issue on tablets, I knew I had to have it. Not what you think! (Well, mostly not. OK, partly.) Anyway, I’ve been curious about how advertising would develop on tablets, which seem to combine the potential of magazines, TV, and the Web all in one. So far, it’s very promising.

And what better than one of the most-read-ogled issues of any magazine to see what advertisers are doing with the many opportunities on tablets. (Especially when it gives you license, shameless as it may be, to run photos that might get more traffic than, say, a photo of Larry Page.)

So while other, less refined bloggers slaver over that other stuff in the issue, I used my Samsung Galaxy tablet (no iPad in my budget just yet) to do the deep reporting and check out all the ads.

What did I find? Sadly, not much. A couple of the ads suggested intriguing possibilities–but most of them weren’t carried out. Most advertisers still seem to be in “horseless buggy” mode, thinking of the tablet as nothing more than a PC you can touch. It’s very clear it’s going to be much more than that, but advertisers have a long way to go to exploit the possibilities for unprecedented interactivity and engagement.

Here’s a sample of the ads, front to back:

* Dodge Ram’s Not All Heroes Dress In White ad is the first one to come up in the magazine. Everything’s black, fitting the color scheme of the new truck due out this spring. We can see the ad, photos of models, a video trailer at a black-sand beach in Hawaii, and what would be called, on a DVD, a bonus feature on the making of the video.

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