Time INc's digitally-printed, variable content, personalised magazine

Five to one: this was the reported ratio of readers that requested a printed copy of Time Inc’s mine magazine, compared to those requesting digital delivery. It’s a heart-warming story for print, and one that Susan Popler-Roy, director of production operations at Time Inc, describes as “really interesting and exciting”.

Her printer, Val DiGiacinto, VP Sales and partner of Ace Group in New York – who joined Popler-Roy at mediaPro to talk about the project – not surprisingly wore a big, beaming smile, as he added: “Nothing like this has been done before.”

So what is mine? It has been a new attempt to breathe life into magazine publishing. Car manufacturer Lexus and Lexus’s Los Angeles ad agency Team One were seeking ways to promote the 2010 Lexus RX car. Lexus wanted to “communicate within a medium that demonstrated a like-minded commitment to user-centric innovation”, according to its VP of marketing, David Nordstrom.

Working with US publishers Time Inc and American Express Publishing, it was decided to create a personalised magazine delivering targeted ads and editorial. Thirty-one thousand printed copies would be produced, and 200,000 electronic. Readers that signed up could choose to receive content from five out of eight magazine titles (namely, TIME, Sports Illustrated, Food & Wine, Real Simple, Money, InStyle, Golf, and Travel + Leisure).

They were also asked to answer a number of lifestyle questions (for example: do you like to sing in the car?; and, which do you crave more – sushi or pizza?), and to specify their preference for either a print copy or a digital copy of the magazine. Then every two weeks for 12 weeks they would get their fortnightly 36-page copy of mine, packed with the editorial content they were interested in, and with advertising personalised to their tastes (based upon their responses to the sign-up questions).

The editorial content used was previously published material and internally there was a missionary task to persuade the publishers and the editors of the individual titles to pass on some of their articles for the magazine, knowing that the design integrity might be altered as the format of the new title would be different. Also each article had to be of set length to suit the brick by brick way that the title would be assembled.

The next question was one of production: how 31,000 issues of a magazine would be printed evert fortnight and delivered to readers across the US so that each received the magazine on time. Time Inc is used to satellite production of its weeklies, where print runs can stretch into millions and where each may have different sections according to geography or demographics. This is usually achieved through printing alternate sections and using selective binding to create shorter run versions of the main titles. But this method would not work on the new magazine. Production had to be entirely digital, but to maintain the kind of brand image desired by both Lexus and Time, each magazine also had to be a thing of beauty, a high end luxurious piece of print. They were produced on HP Indigo presses at Ace Group.

The print sign-up target of 31,000 was hit within a month of launch, says Popler-Roy. The discussions began in November 2008, with a first production meeting in January 2009. DiGiacinto says: “We told Time that we would like to see 60 to 90 days worth of planning time, because usually you have more questions after a project than you had at the start. You find things don’t work out the way you hoped.”

Flexibility was a necessity for Ace Group, because the requirements from publisher and advertising partner were subject to frequent change. Popler-Roy confirms: “We were changing requirements until the day it went to press, but we needed to deliver what Lexus really wanted. Every time we investigated something we found we could get some more detail.”

This was about refining how the data that each subscriber had provided might be used. Each reader had been assigned a personal code so they could also change what they wanted to read with each consecutive issue. In all, Ace was working with 14 fields of data with which to populate the Lexus ads in the magazine, and working with Time and the agency to devise ever more creative use of that data.

The highly variable pages fell at the front and rear of the book. The outside back cover carried a variable ad and the subscriber’s address. Both inside covers were variable, as was the contents page. The editorial pages were fixed within their allocated formats, but clearly had changing folios and as each also was framed by a gold band, the printer had to deliver this consistently. Each issue of the 31,000 run comprised 200,000 printed sheets of paper of four pages each. With the different treatments for the ads and the reader’s ability to adjust his preferences, Ace also needed to run the complete data set for each issue.

The cover section was printed and then UV coated. The eight interior sections were printed in collated form. Cover and inside section were brought together on a Duplo bookletmaker to which Ace had added barcode readers. This ensured that cover and interior pages matched up. Where they didn’t, the rejected pages could be made up by hand as each was also marked with a human readable code, or else a replacement print triggered. The print sequence tied in with postal discounts, starting with addresses on the west coast and moving across the time zones towards New York. The launch issue was sent out using first class post, subsequent issues using standard mail.

Reader reaction was good from the outset, exemplified by the way that they continued to manipulate their profiles, allowing advertising messages to become more sophisticated. In one example, date of birth information allowed the reader’s star sign and the year of birth according to the Chinese astrological calendar to be part of the advert.

Other ads used the first choice of magazine to emphasise driving the Lexus. For example, if a reader had selected Golf Magazine the ad would be about them driving the Lexus to the golf course. Information gleaned from the address was used to name an iconic road associated with each state: Route 1 in California, the Garden Parkway in New Jersey or the ironically named Long Island Expressway for New Yorkers. “One ad that was run had three areas of personalisation which could mean 1,000 variables from a production perspective,” says DiGiacinto.

Such personalisation is not to everybody’s taste, and a trawl of the internet for comments about mine throws up a few examples of readers finding this aspect, as one puts it, slightly “creepy”. That said, the project drove 16% opt in for information on the new Lexus RX, making the advertiser and agency very happy with the response. Readers were surveyed and said they had spent three times as long reading mine as they would normally have done with a magazine. A brand recognition questionnaire for Lexus also delivered promising brand metrics.

The potential is there for similar projects to take the concept on further, according to Popler-Roy, who says: “When it happens again, and it will happen, it will be more complex. We had nine different departments within Time Inc. working on this, and you really need a central authority of communications so the left hand knows what the right hand is doing.”

For DiGiacinto there is the satisfaction of involvement in the success of the project to look back on. He had comments from colleagues in the trade about the printed quality of the magazine, prompting some to wonder if they had received carefully selected issues rather than just copies printed in the production run. “People I spoke to were impressed by the colour consistency we achieved through the Indigos. Every issue had the same colour coding throughout, which we matched. This is where having the right technology, the right team and the capacity paid off.

“We’ve been doing digital print since 1994 and we’ve always been championing that this is the year it will happen. All the separate issues aligned, and two years ago, it simply would not have been possible.”

And he looks forward to increasing the production print run next time: “We could have done more than 31,000 copies, no problem. We never anticipated this kind of response for print over digital.”