Owning the Channel: On-Pack Magazines for CPG

I wrote in ClickZ last week about marketers owning their own channel (self-link; mea culpa). There's a story today that's definitely in that same vein: a company is launching that's putting mini-magazines on the side of soda bottles.

In the past, I've met with people at CPG companies who have noted that their product-distribution network is larger than any media companies. The problem was always what do to with it. This is certainly an interesting solution. There are a ton of questions about whether publishers want to create content this size, whether consumers want to read something this size, and how the whole pricing model will work.

The company evidently has been testing and refining this for a while now, so they may have these issues sorted. The idea, though, that the product channel is being leveraged is very cool, though and certainly points to new ideas.