Putting 40,000 Readers, One by One, on a Cover

Variable Data Publishing (VDP) proof-of-concept puts a satellite photo of all 40,000 subscribers' neighborhood on their individual copies of Reason magazine.

The New York Times is car­ry­ing a sto­ry about Reason, the month­ly Libertarian mag­a­zine. The June issue ofReason will arrive on sub­scribers’ doorsteps with a sur­prise on the cov­er: The subscriber’s house. 

Reason, June 2004, show­ing a satel­lite pho­to of Editor In Chief Nick Gillespie’s house

The direct to sub­scriber copies of Reason will be cus­tomized for eac­hand every one of the 40,000 sub­scribers. Each recip­i­ent will see a cov­er illo that is a satel­lite pho­to of his neigh­bor­hood, with his house circled.

In the same issue, the Editor’s Note will be cus­tomized to the recip­i­ent with regard to com­ments address­ing com­mut­ing time, edu­ca­tion­al attain­ment, and per­cent­age of chil­dren liv­ing with grandparents—all infor­ma­tion culled from Reason‘s sub­scriber data­base and oth­er sources. Already some of the ads in Reason are cus­tomized to spe­cif­ic sub­scriber facts on file with the magazine.

Reason, with help from print­er man­u­fac­tur­er Xeikon and direct­mar­ket­ing firm Entremedia, is demon­strat­ing the pow­er of dig­i­tal print­ing. Without plates, every copy can be cus­tomized onpress. Plug a sub­scriber data­base into the work­flow and every page ofevery copy of an issue can be ful­ly cus­tomized for the par­tic­u­lar subscriber.

As Nick Gillespie, edi­tor in chief of Reason, said: “What if you received a mag­a­zine that only had sto­ries and adsthat you were inter­est­ed in and per­tained to you? That would be a mag­a­zine that every­one would want to read.”

What infor­ma­tion has your mag­a­zine on file about sub­scribers? To what use could yourmag­a­zine put that information?