Pressmart Media Ltd. and Curtis Circulation Company have teamed up to launch iMags, a digital sales, distribution and marketing service for magazine publishers.
The service will deploy online advertising, such as banners and landing pages, to attempt to get magazine readers to sign up for digital editions. It will also work with publishers to place advertisements on the homepages of specific publications, and Pressmart will leverage its e-mail marketing capabilities to drive readers to iMags.
“Basically it’s a digital replication of magazines, catalogs, anything that’s available in print we’re going to push out in a Web application distributed to laptop PCs and handheld devices,” said Myles Fuchs, president of Pressmart.
“It’s great for companies that want to replicate the look and feel, the contextual quality, of a printed product, but with all the interactivity of multimedia. It can stream a demonstration of a product or a commercial video, pages will flip and customers can share and save articles,” he said.
Using Pressmart technology, iMags delivers electronic editions of magazines on multiple channels, including Web, mobile, RSS, podcasts, blogs, social networking sites and search engines, among others. By working with Curtis, iMags is able to offer digital editions from the circulation company’s clients, which include The Economist Group, Rodale Inc. and Hachette Filipacchi. Curtis distributes about 1,200 magazines in all.
Lagardere Co., a 90% owner of Curtis Circulation, is opening its entire catalog to iMags. Titles include Elle, Woman’s Day and Car and Driver. Fuchs said the service will be offered to other publishers and e-commerce companies as well.
“People go with digital partly because of the cost of paper and postage, and iMags can still get contextual without the cost of printing and mailing,” Fuchs said of the company’s value proposition. “There’s a youth angle as well because younger consumers are less print-centric and more digital- and mobile-centric.”
