If you’re looking for a good example of a company leveraging their strategic partnerships to develop both a new technology and a marketing concept in order to leapfrog their competitors, check out the October issue of Esquire magazine at your favorite newsstand in September. It should be easy to find. It will be the one flashing “The 21st Century Begins Now” as images scroll across its cover. To help celebrate its 75th anniversary, Esquire contracted with E Ink Corporation to develop a version of its flexible display technology (used in the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle) that can be used as an electronic magazine cover.

Being able to utilize the digital display technology in a magazine required overcoming two major obstacles: cost and power. To subsidize the cost, Esquire partnered with Ford Motor Company to feature the Flex Crossover vehicle on the inside cover, using the same E Ink technology. The problem of providing a battery to run the display for 90 days, yet small enough to be distributed in a magazine, was solved through a six-figure investment from the Hearst Corporation, which owns Esquire and is a major shareholder in E Ink.

So, what’s the significance of this new combination of technology and traditional media? Either Hearst has come up with the latest equivalent of the musical greeting card, or they’ve looked far enough into the future to see the value of driving a technological innovation, rather than waiting for it to evolve on its own. While the initial use of E Ink’s digital paper technology is limited and could be viewed as just a gimmick, it does reveal some of the potential of digital printing. Plus, Esquire has exclusive use of the technology through 2009.

The big question is: what is this technology’s ultimate capability? Can content be dynamically updated? Can it be interactive? Is this the portable digital platform that the traditional publishing industry has been looking for? Strategically, Hearst has positioned itself in both the technology and publishing spaces to be able to capitalize on the advantages this technology provides over its competitors.

Personally, I’ll be picking up two copies: one to save in my collection of new media innovations and the other to tear apart and see what makes it tick.
For additional information about this story, see:

“News Flash From the Cover of Esquire: Paper Magazines Can Be High Tech, Too” - New York Times

“Esquire Becomes First Magazine to Merge Digital Technology with Printed Pages” - Ford Motor Company