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Digital watermarking assists in Cooking Light

Time Inc.’s Cooking Light brand—including its monthly magazine and line of prepared meals for retail—prides itself on giving its consumers the tools to make it easier to get healthy, delicious meals on the table.

Pw 74563 Cooking Light

In early 2013, Cooking Light magazine added mobile technology to its toolkit by incorporating digital watermarking in all of its recipes—a feature that was carried over to the packaging of its ready-made meal solutions upon their launch in mid-2013.

As used in the magazine, Digimarc® ID digital watermarks from Digimarc Corp. are embedded into photographs of prepared recipes that readers can scan using the Digimarc® Discover smartphone app. Upon scanning, readers are taken directly to the recipe page online, where they can save the recipe. For those readers who have registered with the brand, they can also save the recipe to their own personal recipe file as well as create a shopping list of the ingredients.

Cooking Light Vice President of Marketing Michelle Lamison says the company selected Digimarc’s digital watermarking over other technologies, such as QR codes and similar systems, due to aesthetics, reliability, and simplicity. “While we [marketing] are on the business side, our editors love to have the magazine look pretty,” she says. “QR codes and other visual devices like that tend to impede the beauty of the photography.

“Also, what we found with some other technologies, such as Augmented Reality, was that while they were cool and catchy, they didn’t work all the time. In addition, they provided more of a gaming experience, which is great for some brands, but in this case, we really were talking about enhancing that experience and making it easier for her to get these meals on the table. So we wanted something that was simple and reliable.”

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