I love the creative way in which Forbes Magazine has created a subscription order form card with a detachable bookmark. Yet, I believe that a disposable bookmark should be more useful, and shouldn’t have to be removed from a subscription order form card. Therefore, I’m going to suggest the following advertising strategy:

Magazines should create a low-cost disposable bookmark that features a decoder window at the top of such a bookmark, and include one in each magazine. The decoder would be used by magazine readers to decode coded messages placed on AD pages. Therefore, the bookmark would be useful in two ways.

The coded areas on the AD pages would mainly be used to promote prize give aways. Yet, the advertising company could use such coded areas in a lot of different ways – especially if magazines had detachable coded areas on the AD pages.

If magazine companies utilized such an AD strategy, they could charge a premium for such AD spaces. And the companies sponsoring the Ads would receive more views for every AD placed. And best of all users / readers would receive a useful bookmark with every magazine issue.