ChasNote

I’m curious about SI’s print-smartphone integration. It sounds a bit gimmicky — buy the print edition of the swimsuit issue, and then swipe your smartphone over the models to get special videos. I’m sure the numbers will be impressive, but I doubt it will be a model for any publisher that doesn’t have videos of models frolicking around in nothing but body paint.

Meanwhile, I like Sobe’s banner ads running alongside the digital swimsuit section. If visitors are attracted to the content because it’s models in body paint, those visitors are bound to pay attention to a Sobe banner that features the same. By acknowledging context (and not just audience profile), Sobe’s campaign will have more success than ads targeted by cookies alone.

Ah, the good old days — when every aspiring school-paper editor got an education in ad sales!

School newspapers in the old days, I learned today while reading a of Henry Luce, made you apply for staff positions by way of a multi-month internship called “heeling,” where you racked up points for writing, editing and selling ads, among other things. In high school,

“[Henry Luce] began working for both the school newspaper (the Record) and the literary magazine (the Hotchkiss Literary Monthly, known to students as the Lit) in his first term. Both awarded places on the basis of strenuous and highly quantitative competition. Boys received points not just for the quality and quantity of their submissions but for selling ads and subscriptions, doing clerical chores, even cleaning up.”

Luce joined the Yale college newspaper (the Yale Daily News) though a similar heeling process, and then went on to found Time Inc at age 23, launching Time Magazine, Fortune, Life and Sports Illustrated over the next 30 years.

Let’s bring back heeling!