Hi, Val DiGiacinto from the Ace Group in New York City.  I'm Vice President of Sales and partner of the company.  I'm here today to talk to you about the Mind Magazine.

Last March I did an interview with WhatTheyThink.com about the project that was just starting at that point.  In fact, the day before April Fools Day we launched the first print project of the job.  And for those of you who aren't familiar with Mind Magazine, it was a collaborative effort between Lexus, Team One, which was the agency out in California, and Time, Incorporated utilizing the content of eight of their publications.  What the reason that this came to be was that Lexus wanted to bring up the awareness of their new vehicle, the RX350, last year and they thought a very unique way of doing it was to kind of take the compatibility of the vehicle that they were building that was supposed to be, and was actually, more user-friendly and the ability to build it to sort of suit your style.

So they wanted to compare it to -- you can change the color of your iPod, you can have personalized clothing, you can get personalized other things in your life, why not a personalized magazine?  So Lexus was the sponsor; there were four Lexus ads in every one of the magazines but Time, Inc. actually provided the content.  You had the choice of selecting five out of eight of those magazines and we produced a print run of 31,000.  So we did 31,000 subscribers, six issues of a 32-page plus cover, so a 36-page magazine, that was 100 percent personalized.  The only page of those 36 that wasn't personalized was the front cover.  It was all produced on HB Indigo presses.  We had a 24x7 production cycle that lasted about two weeks for each one of the six issues that we produced.

We finished the last one in August, shipped out -- so by the end of August everybody had received their six issues and there is some good news that came out of this project now.  Lexus has evaluated along with Time, Inc. and Team One and they found that they had the readership time on Mind Magazine was three times that of a regular magazine.  Overall response was that more people wanted to have print when they had the choice of print, then they did digital, which I think is really great news for everybody that's in print.  Let's hear the little applause.

They had an over 60 percent lift rate on the awareness of the vehicles and they value -- they judge that based on the click-through response that they had on a third page during the subscription experience that brought you to a page that allowed you to see more about the Lexus RX.  Sixty percent over what they thought they were going to get, so it was a tremendous asset to them.

Successful project certain for Lexus.  For Time and for Team One and for the Ace Group it was a highly successful product and provided us with a lot of print and the ability to come and talk about a story that I think may be an industry-changing event.

We spoke into other publications and we feel like this may be something that's good for our future and good for yours as well.