By Jerrid Grimm - VP, Client Services at Newad
The social internet has united people in a way that was unimaginable only 10 years ago. Today I can instantly be connected through Twitter, Facebook or any of a dozen other social services to someone as close as a family member or as removed as a complete stranger in Russia. This broad reach is what has allowed services such as Tripadvisor and Yelp to form such powerful recommendation engines. I can instantly find the highest rated sushi restaurant in my city or the best hotel to stay at on my next vacation. This decision is based not on a fancy TV ad but on the aggregate opinions of thousands of people that I have never met.
Last Thursday in Toronto, the Consumer Packaged Goods marketing industry, representing brands from Colgate toothpaste to Trojan Condoms, gathered at The Best New Product Awards annual conference. A highlight of the Awards, amidst the amazing speakers, the winner’s and the open bar, was the release of Canada’s first ever Near Field Communication (NFC) campaign for Consumer Packaged Goods. Robert Levy, President of Brandspark and Rosanne Caron, President of the Out of Home Marketing Association of Canada presented the results of the groundbreaking campaign, which gave Canadians the opportunity to win a $500 prize pack, simply by tapping their phone to the ad.
Two of Gauge Mobile’s partners, Newad Media and Astral Out of Home, were at the event, providing a hands on demo of the integration of NFC into their advertising displays. 2 lucky marketers walked away with a whopping $100,000 in media space, and in addition Newad gave away a brand new Samsung Nexus smartphone, one of the most popular NFC enabled phones on the market today.
By Tony Vassiliev - Chief Executive Officer at Gauge Mobile Solutions Inc.
I was a late bloomer when it comes to online shopping, and not because of security concerns. I get buyer’s remorse event when it comes to small purchases so I would spend hours researching online and after finding the “right” product I would still go to a nearby retailer and buy it in person. Being in Canada, the fear of high shipping costs and duties didn’t help. As more retailers provided online options, with free shipping and ample consumer reviews, click to buy became natural.
General consensus is that mobile is the next frontier for commerce and since many are familiar, dare I say comfortable with online shopping the adoption should be fast and easy. Retailers are well aware of this growing channel and many are experimenting with virtual stores to test consumers’ appetite; both online only retailers and the ones with brick & mortar and online storefronts.
The most noted example is that of a grocery retailers Tesco, setting up a virtual store in a metro station in Korea. Their objective was to grow customer base without increasing the number of stores and to help expedite the grocery shopping experience for the busy consumer. Their experiment was a tremendous success increasing online sales by 130%. This led many other retailers to test this concept in Europe, Australia and North America. However unlike Tesco, few if any have shared their results.
Working in the mobile tech industry I often forget that our everyday topics may be industry jargon or better yet magic for the general consumer. Near Field Communication (NFC) is high on that list and just may become the ace up the mobile magician’s sleeve. NFC is based on existing RFID standards which is nothing new but its impact on mobile commerce has garnered attention from financial institutions, carriers and phone manufacturers. In fact three of the largest US carriers (AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon) have joined forces to create a mobile commerce platform called ISIS, which uses NFC to securely transmit information between a consumer’s smartphone and a contactless payment terminal.
I experienced the ISIS app first hand at SXSW and was very impressed with the user interface and how streamlined the process was for the consumer. The performance by cyber illusionist Marco Tempest really brought the app to life.
At SXSW there are hundreds of topics being explored, dozens of apps hoping to become the next big thing and so many predictions being made that even Nostradamus would get a headache. So what did we see as the underlying theme that tied everything together this year? Interestingly it seems as though we’re evolving as a community to become less about technology and more about real life. If the 90’s were about the growth of information, and the 2000’s about the growth of social media, we believe that this decade is about becoming more human.
The most common argument against QR codes is that the content behind the code is lackluster and the poor experiences will stop people from coming back. We tend to agree, having seen everything from QR codes that link to flash videos (not viewable on iOS devices) to non-mobile websites that are almost impossible to read on the small screen of a smartphone. So whose fault is it when QR codes get a bad rap?
