IT IS the ultimate in invasive but highly targeted marketing — and a world-first for a magazine cover. More than 40,000 subscribers to Reason, a highbrow politics magazine based in Los Angeles, will this week find their own name on the front cover together with an aerial photograph of their own home, circled in red. Beneath is the headline “They Know Where You Are!”

The magazine, the June cover story of which promises to reveal “the unsung benefits of a database nation”, goes even further in its attempt to shock readers with the amount of information about them that is publicly available.

The editor’s letter, by Nick Gillespie, is personally addressed to the subscriber, and includes references to the postal area in which the subscriber lives, including the average commuting time, the percentage of neighbours who have college degrees and how many children are cared for by their grandparents.

“I would say the reaction so far from about 97 per cent of our subscribers has been incredibly positive,” Mr Gillespie said. They’re saying it’s incredible and interesting, or ‘I almost soiled my pants’. Maybe 2 per cent are saying ‘You missed my house by a mile’ and then there’s 1 per cent who say we’ve invaded their privacy and they’re cancelling their subscriptions.”

The number of readers signing up for the magazine on its website, meanwhile, has tripled this week. “We usually get 250 to 350 new subscribers each month, now it looks like it’s going to be 750 to 900,” he said.

Even the advertisement on the magazine’s back cover for the Marijuana Policy Project, in favour of medical marijuana use, is tailored to subscribers, telling them the name of their congressman and whether he or she voted in favour of raids by armed federal agents on users of medical marijuana.

It features a picture of a wheelchair-bound Suzanne Pfeil together with the quote: “I use marijuana legally under California law to treat the pain and spasm of post-polio syndrome. But on September 5, 2002, I awoke to five federal agents pointing assault rifles at my head. The agents yelled at me to stand up. I explained, ‘I can’t. I’m paralysed.’ Then they handcuffed me.”

Such personalised advertising was recently predicted in the Hollywood film Minority Report, which featured billboards that talked to commuters as they walked by. The magazine’s front cover, meanwhile, could easily have featured in George Orwell’s 1984.

The cover story, entitled “Database Nation: The Upside of Zero Privacy”, points out that everything from addresses and aerial photographs to home floor plans, mortgage records, vehicle registrations and internet searches are all readily available to modern corporations and nosy individuals.

It argues, however, that zero privacy is beneficial because the free flow of information makes markets function more efficiently, allowing supermarkets to tailor offers to customers; allowing firms to offer loans instantly online; and lowering the cost of financial products such as mortgages.

As the magazine’s provocative back cover illustrates, however, the database society also makes political propaganda a lot more effective. Both candidates for this year’s US presidential election are using databases to target key voters in so-called “swing states”.

Reason magazine boasts on its website that it makes “a principled case for liberty and individual choice in all areas of human activity”. It was founded in 1968 by students at Boston University, eventually moving to California and in 1978 becoming a part of the Reason Foundation, which also runs a think-tank, Reason Public Policy Institute. It has about 55,000 readers, 40,000 of them postal subscribers, which made it possible to personalise the cover. Copies sold on newsstands all carried an aerial photograph of the editor’s house in Oxford, Ohio.

Mr Gillespie said that the June edition of Reason cost only $5,000 (£2,800) more than a normal issue to print. Xeikon, a printer manufacturer, provided the technology; Entremedia, a database company, and AirPhotoUSA, an image firm, supplied the personal information and aerial photographs.

Most of the database information came from free sources such as the US Geological Survey, Microsoft’s TerraServer.com and the US Census Bureau’s website. The magazine deliberately held back from publishing even more personal details about its subscribers, such as their mortgage repayments, supermarket loyalty card details or their favourite brand of toothpaste.

The June edition did, however, involve countless extra hours of labour by a dozen people in six states.

HOW THEY DID IT

To produce the edition, aerial photographs and local statistics were downloaded on to a computer and merged with Reason’s subscriber database. A software program matched the information and fed it to a state-of-the-art Xeikon printing machine that can mass-produce unique colour copies. Until recently, a separate printing plate would have been needed for each personalised front cover.

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