Imagine flipping through a magazine, seeing an ad for a hotel and being able to download meeting room schematics, tour the facility and book rooms without having to visit a website or turn the page. Plan Your Meetings, a meetings media company, has made that and more possible with the industry’s first-ever augmented reality publication: The 2013 PYM Annual Guide.

The PYM Annual features editorial and advertising pages encoded with interactive experiences that range from downloadable PDFs and videos, to social media call-to-actions and educational content that are triggered when readers scan the page using a mobile device and the PYM+ app. Interactions are tracked on a monthly basis.

Ad augmentation is offered free to PYM print/digital edition advertisers. Next ad close date is Aug. 8. Meeting and event planners can request a free print copy here.

“They say print is dead, but that was before it could talk back and tell you who was reading it,” says PYM’s VP of Creative Kristi Casey Sanders, who will teach meeting and event organizers how to use augmented reality at Aug. 13 PlannerTech and Aug. 22 PYM LIVE events in New York City. “Now advertisers can see how people engage with their print ads. By encoding skews in augmented content, they can identify how much traffic they’re receiving from print channels while interacting with our readers. That’s a first.”

PYM’s mission is to educate, empower and inspire the meeting and event planners who tend to plan 80 percent of the meetings and get zero percent of the credit in corporate America. In addition to a print annual, it offers comprehensive marketing programs to help hotels, CVBs and other industry suppliers reach PYM’s audience of 100,000 meeting/event planners, while producing award-winning educational content and live events.

“Plan Your Meetings has a long history of developing innovative ways to connect people,” Sanders says. “Using augmented reality not only allows us to bring added value and ROI to our advertisers, it gives us the opportunity to provide additional educational content and educate planners using an emerging technology that has many exciting event applications.”