Het Nieuwe Eten - Dutch QR Goodness

It's been a long time since I posted. Things have been hectic over the past year in Tokyo and Amsterdam, but the dust is finally starting to settle.

While waiting for the tram this morning to go to work at my new job, I noticed a new ad at the tram stop featuring a qr-code for Voedingscentrum (Nutrition Center), a site promoting healthy foods and encouraging people with their "kies ik gezond" ("I choose to be healthy") message, along with various tools and resources on their site. Use Google translate to check it out if you are not one of the 20 million people on this planet that speak Dutch ;). These codes contain a web link and are now on over 1,500 billboards in The Netherlands. Don't have a barcode reader on your phone? They have you covered: just SMS GEZOND to 3669 to receive a free SMS with a link to the mobile site.

I noticed that the broodjes with and without cheese in the background also formed a QR-code :). Actually there are several designs around the city using food to create a QR-code pattern in the background. Props to SPRXMobile for putting this together. I have been involved with a few projects that used 2D codes here in Europe and this is among the more creative ones I have seen. I am very happy to see this kind of initiative and smooth execution to bring mobile to a marketing campaign, turning what could have been "just a poster" into a multi-channel call-to-action, giving me something to do while I scoff at the never-correct tram schedules. It is especially cool to see it here in Amsterdam where I live, rather than just reading about it happening elsewhere.

By the way, I am still working in the mobile space here in Amsterdam, though my focus is now on LBS and navigation services. I will still be all up in the barcode and NFC space in my own time.

Mobiles and Campaign Discovery

I like reading mobile marketing case studies (I think it's a side effect from all the EDGE radiation I have absorbed), and Bluetooth marketing for mobiles looks pretty difficult. Plus given what I have seen it provides little benefit over barcodes in some situations. If I have to get close enough to read instructions I could have scanned a barcode instead. Even someone unfamiliar with barcodes would probably have an easier time installing an application than configuring their Bluetooth.

Since many people are still a little unsure about Bluetooth marketing, voluntary opt-in is difficult to trigger gracefully. This is less difficult with other calls-to-action like SMS/Email, barcodes and RFID where interaction requires deliberate action, but the required action is so simple that a transaction can be completed before the impulse to participate subsides.

• SMS keywords and "empty mail" (Japan's mobile email equivalent to SMS opt-in) require the user to transmit information from some media to their device. Somewhat inconvenient, but it definitely constitutes a voluntary opt-in.
• 2D-barcodes require the user to activate their code reader and aim their device's camera at the barcode. The device them reads the information from the media itself. Since the user does very little to facilitate the transfer of information, it would take the same amount of time to input a page of text as it does a URL. It can also be used to trigger the other forms of opt-in such as SMS, empty-mail, web access, client application download, or even further instructions or special information about a campaign. It could contain all of these at once. Granted, these are best suited for print media. People can remember an short code/keyword long after the commercial is over or the magazine is lost, but barcodes demand immediate participation unless they can take it with them (say, on a business card). Still I think the act of scanning a code is engaging rather than tedious (like typing an SMS). You can even embed extra information like what publication the ad is running in or what region the magazine was shipped to, etc. Planned well you could gather some interesting demographics this way.
  
• With RFID the user must get their device deliberately close to an antenna. It is possible the use could trigger their chip accidentally, but I haven't seen this happen. RFID is a very nice blend of requiring deliberate participation while keeping the transfer mechanism super simple. "Come a little closer." The problem is that not so many devices are equipped with chips.
  Then again this is my relatively uninformed opinion.
• Bluetooth is a little different from the others. Most of the time you are prompted to participate without initiating contact (walking or even riding your bike by a shop does not count as an opt-in). Other times you have to follow some instructions to make your device receptive to the campaign. Since many people are concerned about nasty-ware and Bluetooth security this may considered invasive and bothersome. Most of the time the mechanism is bigger than the message. All that work to get this image on my phone telling me to buy your product. If it had been an old-school print ad you might have found my way there in the time it took to get the message via Bluetooth.

"Biased"? I don't know what your talking about. Denso Banzai!

Since most phones have cameras and scanning applications are free and many, there is more of a hardware barrier to RFID than barcodes. Plus it is generally cheaper to place a print ad than a networked RFID station.

There is nothing wrong with SMS/Email opt-in, and as I mentioned barcodes can be used to facilitate these mechanisms in situations where it cannot replace them. For instance, you can scan a code and be presented with an SMS, recipient and message already filled in and ready to send. The same can be done with email. URL's, contact information, encrypted data (like on Japanese work visas), double-byte characters, control characters, and so on. Lots of possibilities, and I have a feeling that this will blow up in 2008 in Europe and the US. At least I hope so ;).

Mobile Adverising: How do I focus this thing?

Tom Wheeler, Managing Director at Core Capital Partners has recently published two articles on mobile marketing that draw a lot of parallels to cable television's advertising model. They are very interesting reads that got me thinking more deeply about distribution models of mobile advertising.

Mobile-related services are personal, but a one-to-one distribution model is costly to implement. Rather than trying to target "everyone" mobile marketing campaigns and ads can still target each individual, and this is easy to do on a mobile web site or with an SMS/email magazine. For casted media and programming, however, it becomes a little more difficult. If you are broadcasting a video feed to a wide audience, how can you target the users on an individual basis? Mr. Wheeler explains how the advertising landscape in the mobile space now closely resembles that of cable television in the 1970's. At first we tried to reach the widest audience possible, but niche programming channels directed at narrower demographics will more effectively target users and probably see a higher conversion rate, if not higher overall participation.

Targeted mobile services resemble a magazine rack at a large bookstore. Anyone who has picked up a fashion magazine (or certain tech magazines) knows that ads can make up more than 50% of it's content. Some people even buy them for the ads. Why? Because they are narrowly targeted and relevant. If only every other ad was pertinent to magazine's theme it would indeed be annoying and you would skip over them to avoid wasting time mentally filtering pages and pages of advertisements. Cable is similar in that I probably won't ever see a Hooter's commercial on Lifetime.

Television commercials are pretty broad in focus. Sure, you will see more toy commercials interleaved with Saturday morning cartoons than during a basketball game, but your favorite station doesn't know you. It just makes educated assumptions about your interests based on demographic research. Mobile services can get to know you though your profile information and behavioral analysis, not a just control group of people similar to you (though cross-referencing similar users is a good way to recommend new products to you). Your favorite mobile service has the means to know what you like, when you like it, what ads you have responded to, etc. If this information is being gathered, it may as well be applied in a way that improves the user experience.

As screens get sharper and larger and networks get faster, the audience will probably tolerate ads taking up display real estate more readily. This will also give marketers an opportunity to provide more interactive campaigns and more interesting incentives.

Animated QR-Codes

ITDesign, makers of DesignQR referred to in the previous post have come up with "movie QR", or animated QR-codes. Basically it looks like they are just animating the images that are embedded in the code. You can see an example below (rather long CM, skip to the last part to see the example).

Scan the code to visit the keitai site and download the follow-up video to find out if Black Jack is Japanese or a foreigner. As a bonus you get to see the kung-fu schoolgirls double-kick QR-Boy in the face. Nice.

QR-Cool

There have been a lot of 2D-barcode upstarts as of late, most of them focusing on making their dot boxes attractive and marketing-friendly. QR-codes, the standard here in Japan, are looked upon as ugly or industrial-looking with low potential to be integrated into a company's look and feel.

Not so. Check out LogoQ and DesignQR. They crush most of the marketing claims touted by other companies, and they can be read with any standard QR-code reader. You know, the reader that comes standard in nearly all Japanese keitai and many Nokia devices. Go ahead, scan a sample.

Here are a few samples from LogoQ.

Here are a few from DesignQR.

Mobile Marketing Trends in Japan

eMarketer is running an article (tomorrow according to the date ;P) about how mobile marketing is seeing a revival in Japan. Using keitai as promotional tools is not new in Japan, but there has been some serious growth over the past year according to the referenced Dentsu 2006 Expenditure Report (PDF).

The use of mobile advertising in nationwide mass campaigns by clients in industries such as beverages and automobiles is already a well-established approach, and total spending in this medium rose to ¥39.0 billion (up 35.4%) in 2006.

Another referenced report from NPD Group indicates that 2D barcodes have become one of the most used features on Japanese mobile phones. Emarketer has made a nice chart:

Anyway, you should check out the original story at eMarketer and have a look at Dentsu's website for variety of free reports.

Mobile Barcodes and Marketing in China

China Economic Review has a story about how mobile barcodes and related technology are being used for mobile marketing in China. sigh... I really need to start talking about something besides dot-boxes...... Anyway, the article mentions three companies in China that are pushing their own 2D-code technology.

• Gmedia: Datamatrix-looking code
  
• MyClick: image recognition, or at least image frame recognition
  
• Inspiry: appear to be selling encoders/decoders for various barcode formats

Once again there is a little hype here.

SMS advertising is a 'push' technology, leaving consumers at the mercy of advertisers. But with barcodes, the consumer chooses whether or not to click.

Now why is SMS advertising only a push technology? There are plenty of SMS-pull advertisements in print, radio, television and online. You know, "Text 'BUSH' to 4231 for your free 'Dubya' ringback tone!". You decide whether or not to text. I think most people can send an SMS faster than they can find and open their code reader and snap a good shot of a QR-code. At least the code-scanner does not have to wait for an SMS response (though some barcode formats require an active internet connection to work).

I am really interested in seeing how fast and reliably arbitrary image recognition solutions like Mobot and MyClick develop this year. They would certainly be "QR-Code Killers" in the mobile marketing world.

Mobile bar-codes are great marketing tools, but I think it will take some work to wean people in the GSM/GPRS world off SMS texting. The referenced article also mentions that poor connection speed will slow the adoption of QR codes. Perhaps, but they can still be used to deliver virtually anything an SMS can (actually, most 2D barcode formats can store much more than 160 characters). I suppose outside of Japan and Korea 2D barcodes are considered new technology, and will be used to promote more advanced campaigns rather than as a new approach to the same old.

Barcodes and Marketing

I thought I knew of a lot of companies purveying their own (or a partner's or parent company's) 2D barcode technology, but I didn't know the half of it. It's pretty amazing how much marketing potential these things have. Even so, while everyone is scrambling to differentiate themselves and position their dot box in a rapidly crowding market they are overselling the whole idea of mobile barcodes.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's really cool that countries besides Japan and Korea are seeing this as an alternative to SMS-based content discovery channels. Plus they can look cool, in the right light I guess. They are getting covered more in the media, even mainstream, non-keitai-freak news. I referenced a story in Financial Times about how mobile industry leaders are taking this technology seriously a few posts ago. A few days ago the New York Times ran a story about how this new technology can communicate with your mobile and included their very own barcode using Neomedia's qode the Aztec 2D-barcode format.

Great. So everyone agrees that it has potential.

Lateley I have seem some blogging about Trillcode and their ability to add logos to their codes.

Adding logos close to the code is possible with almost any code format including QR-code. How different is the Trillcode above different from these examples?

left to right: QR Code generated by Moji-Q Maker , Bee Tagg, standard QR-Code with a little embelishment

If brandability is the goal, then I would recommend an mcode.

They work in a variety of shapes (square, rectangle, L-shaped) and can use multiple colors in the pattern to help match the brand. However, the code that has the most potential in this arena is Colorzip. While most of these that you see look like this:

They can also look like this:

Still cooler is stuff like what Mobot has going on. While other mobile scanning tech is meant to give your phone a "real-world connection", mobot is trying to do that without the use of dot boxes.

Some of the marketing-oriented code formats (Shotcode and Colorzip for instance) can only hold a reference ID and actual data retrieval requires a connection to a server. I suppose this is a combination of wanting to stay in control of usage and keeping less-optimized codes.

Many marketing scenarios proposed would work better (or at least be more convenient to the user) with RFID or Bluetooth approaches. For instance, it is difficult to scan stuff on-the-go. Take out your phone, start the app, maybe a second menu to navigate and now your are ready to scan. Maybe a quick-launch or running in the background would help you scan those codes while you are rushing about.
Granted, Bluetooth and RFID are more expensive, but for the on-the-go situations they are much more convenient. Suica in Japan, for instance, lets you pay for your train ticket on your way through the turnstile. Just get your card or suitably-equipped mobile close enough to the sensor and you are good to go. Can you imagine the lines if everyone had to scan a code to pay? It would be easier to just buy a regular ticket. The example the NYT gave of people driving around scanning bar codes of houses seems kinda ridiculous to me.
The point is that RFID and Bluetooth (and other such technologies) are better suited to some scenarios. If they are driving by it, Bluetooth. If they are walking by it, RFID. If are standing by it or holding it, then barcodes would work (and definitely be cheaper ;)). The idea of someone having an auto accident because they were trying to scan a billboard is pretty ridiculous.

Mobile groups study barcode plan

Ok, I have been rehashing month-old 2D barcode news for a while now, and would like to throw a few other topics into the mix. With all the travelling back and forth between Amsterdam and Tokyo I haven't had much time for blogging, but I plan to update more frequently. But first one last mention of the goings on for mobile barcodes.

Financial Times reported (a month ago ;)) that on 27 February "Leading mobile communications companies" would be meeting to discuss the future of 2D barcodes in the mobile advertising market. One interesting thing mentioned is that DuPont plans to put these codes on all their products shipped worldwide. This will create "internet enabled" physical objects resulting in an "internet of things" according to a quote from Charles Fritz, chairman of Neomedia.

I also found out from the article (I am sure everyone else already knew :P) that there is a Mobile Codes Consortium (or MC²). I would guess that QR-code is the format of choice (I think I saw one on their web site) since I did not see any references to specific types of barcodes up for consideration in the article. Then again, Neomedia is a member of the consortium. Anyway, interesting to continually see more support for this technology outside of Asia.