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Lexus

Put your phone to the page - welcome to the wonderful world of Lexus!

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By Noel Young, Correspondent

March 21, 2012 | 3 min read

Just hold your phone up to the ad in Wired! magazine - and bingo! you're taken straight into the wonderful world of the apps in the dashboard of the Lexus GS 2013.

Lexus and Wired get together

The magazine and the car firm have teamed up in the US to create the first mass-produced print ad embedded with a near-field communications, or NFC, tag.

"Place your NFC-enabled Android phone here," the print ad says in the April magazine , "to experience the apps in the car's dashboard."

Readers don't need to take pictures with the phone camera. The phone automatically detects the NFC chip, reports AdAge magazine.

Up comes a link on the phone's screen. Click it - and a welcome video introduces the car's in-dash App Suite. You can then click on each of the app icons -- Bing, OpenTable, iHeartRadio, Pandora, MovieTickets.com, and Yelp -- to see short videos explaining each app.

"This gives us a chance to bring the technology to life for a reader in a way that words just don't do," said Brian Bolain, Lexus marketing communications manager .

Readers (most of us) who don't have NFC-enabled phones can join the the same tour via a link in the same ad.

Bolain said around 3 million people in the U.S. had NFC-enabled smartphones.

"We know it's a pretty small pool, but we need to do something more interesting in print to make it a little more of an interactive experience."

Howard Mittman, publisher of Wired said they had " a pretty established reputation for doing things first and being experimental. " They had an audience expecting ads like this, " so it doesn't fall on deaf ears."

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