Good Bye Town Cars and Fat Fashion Mags

Simon Dumenco writes in Ad Age that the era of fashion magazine staffers using car services is coming to an end. Because glossy print ads will eventually succomb to the lure of the more interactive web.

"But inevitably, fashion advertisers that prop up the glossies will, like everyone else, increasingly migrate to Web and mobile interactive advertising. And here’s why: Google’s emphasis on text-only ads notwithstanding, we’re all increasingly seeing incredibly cool, sophisticated, Flash-animated and even streaming ads that actually don’t crash our Web browsers. (What used to not usually work ... now usually works.)

Suddenly it’s entirely conceivable that say, Diesel could find the right combination of interactive advertising -- animated Web spots, sponsored mobisodes, etc. -- that would not only give it the same aura of cool it used to get from its perversely witty glossy ads, but would be more cost-effective and truly measurable in a way that print will never be. (Diesel has already created one static ad that appears only online, at ZooZoom.com.)

Meanwhile, the runaway success of shopping mags like Lucky and InStyle has set the entire industry up for a fall by converting the formerly immersive magazine-reading experience into a distracted browse that’s just begging for transactionality.

Every month, Lucky includes a page of peel-and-stick tabs that readers can use to earmark products -- the retarded, slow-motion print version of a click on a Web page. Now imagine a next-generation video iPod with a generous touch screen and a persistent high-speed wireless Web connection. A consumer seeing a great bit of seamless marketing embedded within cool, custom-tailored iPod programming won’t have to fuss with some half-assed Post-it Note to buy right now."