Men's Health magazine is fully snap-enabled

SnapTell has partnered with Men's Health to create an edition -- hitting newsstands on June 24th -- in which all the ads are snap-enabled. In other words, readers buy the magazine, sit down with said magazine, see first ad -- for Westin Hotels, say. They take a photo of the ad, send it to SnapTell and immediately get an offer to stay 3 nights at the Maui Westin Villas and get the fourth night free (or whatever the promotion or reply might be). Pretty neat. Every single ad in the print magazine will have this functionality.

I wonder if advertisers paid a premium to get this multimedia contact with readers. In any case, I think this is a first, and a pretty neat one at that.

UPDATE: NY Times reports on the minimal cost to the advertisers:

"For the advertisers, the effort is low-risk. Neither Rolling Stone, published by Wenner Media, or Men’s Health, published by Rodale, is charging advertisers extra for the feature. SnapTell, too, is charging the publishers only a promotional price, 'but the end business model here is we hope the magazines convince their advertisers to pay a little more for this extra feature, and we would then participate in the upside of the revenues,' said SnapTell’s chief executive, Gautam Bhargava.

"Advertisers said they were happy to give it a whirl, especially given the cheap price tag, even if they did not see an overwhelming response.

"'There really aren’t any benchmarks yet, and we are a test-and-learn company,' said Lisa Cochrane, vice president of marketing for Allstate. 'It's cool, it’s innovative and it's not a really big risk to us because there’s no additional cost.'"