Ex3 Café

QR Codes Hit Prime Time TV!

Check out this episode of CSI: NY that features QR codes:

Good PR for the folks lobbying to have QR codes become the standard for mobile direct response marketing.

More Innovative Ways to Capture Marketing Responses On-the-Go

After writing my last blog post on leveraging the cell phone and SMS text messaging to respond to off-line marketing campaigns, I discovered some other promising mobile phone applications that could perform this task as well.

StarStar® Service from Zoove

Developed by a company named Zoove, this service leverages the actual phone interface (versus say the SMS text interface) on a cell phone to capture customer responses.  Here the end-user simply dials an advertiser’s unique StarStar code—a series of numbers that follow the prefixed “**”—on their mobile phone keypad.  For example, the consumer dials “**12345” and presses the SEND key. 

In a nut shell, Zoove maintains that its solution is much more intuitive and user friendly than text messaging (leveraging mobile phone short codes) to capture marketing responses on-the-go.  This benefit sheet, from Zoove's website, describes the benefits of StarStar service over SMS texting in more detail.

Unfortunately, I was hoping to provide a video demonstration of the StarStar service in action, but I wasn't able to find anything on the Internet.

QR Codes

Already used widely in Japan, QR codes (or 2-D bar codes) are captured as an image, via a cell phone camera, and interpreted by a QR code reader application installed on the cell phone.  Here's a commercial from NTT DoCoMo (Japan's leading mobile phone carrier) that showcases how QR codes are leveraged in a retail advertising.

I experimented with QR codes on my cell phone (a Blackberry Curve) by installing a QR code reader from BeeTagg and reading QR codes I generated from an on-line QR code generator.  At first, the process of lining up my cell phone correctly to the QR code, taking the picture and generating the results was a bit cumbersome (and clunky on my cell phone), but after a few tries, I got pretty good at it.

Here's an interesting article in Business Week on Why QR Codes Could Help Save Print Advertising.

RFID

Mostly thought of for inventory tracking, RFID (radio frequency identification) technology is also being used to bridge the gap between traditional print and on-line media.  In fact, AMUSEMENT Magazine (in France) is claiming to be the first magazine to offer content linked both in print and online by embedding an RFID chip in one of its magazine subscriptions.  In this case, as soon the reader touches the chip to an RFID scanner, a request is sent to a remote server which gets the reader connected to the related online content.  More can be read about AMUSEMENT Magazine's RFID enabled article in this blog post from ForeverGeek.

The technology for all of the above solutions is here now.  The question though, is which technology will become the standard for mobile direct response marketing?  Heck, with all the new mobile phone hardware and applications hitting the market today, the answer may yet to be developed.  Whatever the solution turns out to be though, the potential for mobile direct response marketing is enormous and mass application and user adoption (I believe) is right around the corner.

The Holy Grail for Capturing Responses From (Off-Line) Marketing Campaigns is Likely in Your Hand

If you read my last blog post on digital signage, I believe the holy grail for capturing responses from off-line or "digital out of home" (DOOH) marketing campaigns and promotions is the cell/smart phone.  My belief was further confirmed when I was at the movie theater recently and I saw something, in one of the beverage vending machines, that caught my eye.  In the machine, I noticed a message on each Coke bottle that read "text code under cap to 2653."  This piqued my interest because I realized that this was a real life example of using the cell phone to respond to an off-line marketing offer.  It didn't pique my interest enough though to pay $5.00 for for the Coke!  So I waited until I got home and purchased the Coke from my local store.  The video below shows what happened next:

NOTE:  To learn more about the "short codes" I mentioned in the above video, check out this article in Mobile Marketer.

In short, the cell phone (or more broadly, mobile marketing) is the ideal platform to bridge the gap between off-line and on-line marketing.  I believe this is the ideal platform because:

• Virtually everyone has a cell phone
• A cell phone is portable
• Almost all newer cell phones have text messaging capabilities and text messaging is on the rise (and not just for the younger generation)
• The newest cell phones all have open platforms for new application development
• Cell phones facilitate networked, bi-directional communication (voice and data)

Other prominent companies (or popular TV shows) that have leveraged the mobile platform include:

• Dominos Pizza: Mobile coupons
• Starbucks: Store locator, "text your zip code to..."
• American Idol: Vote for your favorite contestant

This article from e-marketer further confirms my believe that mobile marketing is on the rise.  And to see the power of mobile marketing try texting "Ex3solutions" TO: "368266".