IQ News: Ultigo Links Print Pages To Magazine Home Pages

The race to link magazine print pages to the Web has gained yet another player--this time one that eschews additional hardware and instead uses a title's own Web site and print ads to help consumers navigate online. Called Ultigo, the Atlanta-based company recently signed Teen magazine as its first publishing client. Under the deal, Teen will use Ultigo's UltiMedia service on select edit pages in its November issue, adding some ad pages the following month. UltiMedia-enabled edit and ad pages will bear the company's globe-like logo to notify consumers that they can then find those same pages on the magazine's Web site. First-time visitors to Ultigo-enabled Web sites will be asked to register their age, gender, city, ZIP and e-mail addresses, so the anonymous data can be developed by Ultigo and its partners to establish one-to-one marketing programs "A reader of Ladies Home Journal might think, 'Whoa, what's this new thing?' " said Lynn Lehmkuhl, president of Emap USA Youth Group, which publishes Teen. "But to a 15-year-old, it's a natural to have the opportunity to go to a magazine's Web site for more--whatever more means--whether to shop or to find out more about a product. [Ultigo] is an opportunity to go beyond. And rather than getting a pleasant surprise, [teens] are beginning to expect it." It's that same argument that has led magazines such as Wired and Popular Mechanics to try Tualatin, Wash.-based Digimarc's digital watermarking technology, which requires a PC camera or scanner to work. Meanwhile, other magazines, including Forbes and Adweek, have announced plans to give their subscribers copies of C.A.T., a bar-code-reading wand made by Dallas-based DigitalConvergence that consumers can use to jump from print ads to advertiser Web pages. But even as so much attention is given to linking magazine pages to Web ones, at least one print title has decided to pull back on its print-to-Web convergence plans. According to a spokeswoman, GQ, which in May was touting its role as the first major consumer test of Digimarc's MediaBridge technology, recently put its plans to use the technology in its September issue on hold. "We were just not impressed when we got Wired and saw the print quality," the spokeswoman said, referring to Digimarc's debut in Wired's July issue. "It was not at a caliber that we needed for our GQ advertisers, so we decided not to go with Digimarc for the September issue." The spokeswoman added, however, that as Digimarc improves its digital watermark printing process, GQ "may revisit it in the future." At Digimarc, a spokeswoman acknowledged that the company's relationship with CondE Nast "is still there, but it's on hold." She added, though, that since its debut in Wired, Digimarc-enabled pages have also appeared in Popular Mechanics, where advertisers have signed up to use the technology for six-month stints or more. Next up, she said, will be New York. Digimarc has licensed its technology to 160 magazines so far. In the meantime, Ultigo is betting that consumers will eventually come to know that any page featuring the company's logo will have a corresponding page on the magazine's own Web site. It's a visual process, explained Todd Headrick, who serves as CEO of the year-old company. Ad and edit pages retain their look online, he said, with hot spots added to give users even more information or e-commerce links. "There's no huge up-front investment to make," he said of Ultigo's strategy. "You don't have to build the system, there's no hardware to install and you don't have to have the magazine in hand." Lehmkuhl said she sees Ultigo as "an opportunity to make an ad work hard. What I'm offering an advertiser is the opportunity to go way beyond communicating the message of that page. It's that opportunity to direct the consumer directly to the shopping experience or where to buy it in their neighborhood." Lehmkuhl said her title will be charging a flat fee of $5,000 for each Ultigo-enabled ad to pay for the service's execution costs. "My feeling is that I don't want to put this in the category of some special, little opportunity," she said. "A year from now, I want every single advertiser to not even think about not doing it. I want it to be a mainstream feature of Teen magazine." n

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IQ News: Ultigo Links Print Pages To Magazine Home Pages

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