Despite encouraging signs in 2010, there were many who just believed that QR Codes, or mobile bar codes, were purely an interim technology waiting for the newer, funkier technologies such as NFC and augmented reality to get their act together and take over. But, as is the way, this hasn’t happened yet. Sure, things have progressed, but they still do not yet offer compelling reasons for mobile manufacturers/networks to make the investment to universally include them. This is due to, amongst other things, some interoperability issues between Wikitude and Layar technology, the debate over user interfaces and the pros and cons of real-time versus cached data.

So what has happened?

Not surprisingly, purely due to the number of handsets sold, Android has become the pre-eminent OS when it comes to QR code usage (youscan.me)

What will be interesting to watch — given Google’s recent acquisition of Motorola and its investment in the Android OS — is the potential development of technologies that will combine scanning with geolocation and local search. The mind boggles as to the possibility of even more targeted advertising and response driven communication that will, ultimately, become mass market and of the greater good.

The US has finally woken up to the potential.

Finally! The land of “cellular” has realised the potential of QR and mobile barcodes. The US has witnessed phenomenal growth. If we look at Q1/2011 vs Q4/2010 and also at overall global growth, we can see that the top cities in the world for scanning usage are: Tokyo (in fact several wards of Tokyo on their own feature in the top 10), New York, Houston, London, Chicago, LA, Seattle and Moscow, showing the importance of the US in this arena. (i-nigma.com)

1. United States (181.1%)

2. UK (166.5%)

3. Netherlands (146.3%)

4. Spain (94.4%)

5. Canada (94.0%)

The growth of the “coupon” through sites like Groupon has helped push this. If we look at why US Consumers are using this technology we can see the importance of the “deal”. In other areas, we are now seeing QR codes being used to amuse, not just for transactions or to provide information.

The recent campaign in the US for Victoria’s Secret is pure, utter genius and a superb demonstration of how to take technology to a whole new territory.

The technology as the joke is, as Mastercard® would say, priceless.

The US Postal Service ran a campaign earlier this year encouraging users to utilise QR codes. The QR code promotion offered commercial mailers an upfront 3% discount on the prices for First-Class Mail and Standard Mail letters, which included a QR code inside or on the mail.

According to their data nearly one third of all Standard Mail in the past two months contained a QR code (multichannelmerchant.com)

So what is next?

From ‘umble origins it has grown. QR codes are easy to integrate into products and relatively inexpensive to print and produce, especially when compared to NFC systems that need a whole heap of associated tech to work. QR codes have also been around for a while now, so consumers (well, over 30% of smartphone users mghus.com) know what to do with them.

Marketers are waking up to the fact that QR codes are a very easy way of disseminating much more information than can be encapsulated in a simple print ad, and Smartphone penetration is proliferating at a phenomenal rate, helping to fuel this growth.

Top 10 users of mobile barcodes during Q1/2011 (excluding Japan)

(1) 1. United States

(2) 2. Italy

(3) 3. Germany

(7) 4. United Kingdom

(8) 5. Netherlands

(6) 6. Canada

(5) 7. France

(4) 8. Hong Kong

(17) 9. Spain

(15) 10. Switzerland

() – Position in Q4/2010

(youscan.me)

And things just got smarter

Sites and apps that will generate QR codes with in-built Google Analytics are springing up left, right and centre. How much longer will it be before they will incorporate Omniture or Hitwise coding? It is only a matter of time. Suddenly these seemingly clunky boxes or circles of squiggles become a meaningful, trackable marketing tool.

The wrap

IMHO QR codes are not going to just fade quietly into the ether. More and more ways will be found to use them to link the real to the virtual, to generate and analyse response, to track consumer behaviour, to disseminate more product information, to tease and to tempt.

And all this is currently achievable with technology available in your smartphone today.

What might the future bring? If I could predict that I would be a rich man but I can only see a future where the lines between real and virtual are increasingly blurred.

If I wait another 9 12 months before another update I hope I’m still writing about the advancements in QR code technology and usage. But knowing how quickly tech moves, I doubt it.

Along came ad exchanges which allowed publishers to provide agencies and advertisers with direct access to their inventory and more transparency than many ad networks had. Although auction-based models à la search were introduced, the target segments were often pre-set and companies had to work individually on an exchange by exchange basis.

What advertisers really wanted was the ability to bid on relevant people, across ad exchanges, at a price that was fair. And that’s what real-time-bidding (RTB) is offering.

Two things have happened to make this a reality:

1. Agency groups have launched their RTB / trading platforms to enable them to run campaigns across ad exchanges (via demand-side platforms), allowing them to control the targeting, maximum bid levels and frequency of exposure.
2. Targeting has been improved by plugging in data from the likes of Exelate and Weborama to be able to re-target relevant cookie pools, wherever they are online.

And this is as relevant to B2B advertisers as it is to B2C. To give a relevant B2B example: imagine a typical IT vendor looking to target SMB IT and business decision-makers. In the past, the only route to this audience online would have been the tech and business publishers. With real time bidding, advertisers will still continue to use those targeted sites, however they will complement it by:

1. Re-targeting customers off their own site on the networks / exchanges – either to cross / up-sell with targeted messages or even exclude customers if repeat purchases weren’t likely.
2. Re-targeting prospects off the back of the advertising they are already running on targeted sites by building cookie pools and re-messaging them when they are encountered on the networks / exchanges.
3. Even re-targeting from social profiles on Twitter / Facebook in the same fashion as above.
4. Targeting prospects that have been identified by data companies as SMBs and or are IT/business decision-makers.

Although some of the re-targeting options were available already before, RTB means that the agency / advertiser is in charge of who you are bidding for (as opposed to the ad network) and what price you are willing to pay in an auction environment.

Data was previously a missing piece as well, and it’s still not brilliant for B2B / technology. We need publishers to get on board, selling their cookie pools for one off, re-targeting use in order to get sufficient audience volumes. Some publishers like Future have already done this, and more will follow as they recognise the additional revenue stream they can earn from their premium audiences.

To give an example, 100,000 people on a site may generate 1.5 million impressions; however on the rest of the Internet, the same audience will generate perhaps 30 million impressions, most likely more. Selling the data will provide publishers with an opportunity to monetise their audience many times over.

The implications of real-time bidding are vast:

1. It’s changing the face of the online ad industry: demand and supply-side companies have been forming all over the place and ad networks are being squeezed as budgets shift to exchanges, leading to consolidation in the market.
2. Online media buying decisions are being done within the auction environment more and more, with less focus on relationships and the speed of decisions and optimisations are accelerating, à la search.
3. Advertisers will be paying closer to the true value of audiences, cutting out the waste and providing more targeted (and sequential) messaging along the purchase consideration cycle and focusing on optimising against their ROI goals.
4. Power is being taken back to the agency and advertiser from the ad networks.
5. Percentage share of display advertising will increase.

Real-time bidding is transforming the digital advertising landscape as we speak. WPP has been investing heavily in the MIG to capitalise on the opportunity, strongly believing that technology and data combined will transform the industry.

Here’s a helpful, if somewhat confusing, overview of the change that’s taking place in online advertising industry:

From augmented music videos, to wearable transportation, in the current economic climate (sic), it’s great to know there are people out there who still get paid to think outside the box (also sic). Here are some of the results.

Activate the Future

Thought Leadership. This is a phrase that gets thrown around more than the ubiquitous “current economic climate”, but what does it actually mean?

Some companies feel that thought leadership is throwing out a white paper, or a case study and watching the collective audience nod their heads in approval and marvel at their insights.

Now, I’m not knocking white papers and case studies — both are very powerful and valuable tools in the marketing toolbox — but with the sheer mass of content, it’s tricky to separate the substance from the sales pitch.

For companies like BMW, thought leadership goes beyond solely marketing expensive cars to fanboys. They are thinking about what mobility means for the human race. Ok, so they don’t always get it right, but they are certainly going in the right direction.

Their new film series (launching soon) takes off the ‘batwings’ and shows some of the best and brightest thinking seriously.

Take a look at the introduction and upcoming series which starts Wednesday 2nd Feb.

Will.I.Apps

I’ve got a feeling… this is going to be big.

The Black Eyed Peas’ front man — will.i.am — has just recently launched the iPhone app: ‘BEP360’.

Even though ‘pop stars’ have the app store crawling with cheesy music video apps, selling everything from Rapper headphones to Nike’s, it seems one of them is finally doing something a little smarter.

Using the built in accelerometer and gyro, this app creates a custom, 360° party wherever you are.

Hold your iPhone in front of you, and your office, bedroom or local McDonald’s turns into an augmented reality music video. Check it out:

Majority Report

Microsoft Surface is nothing new; it’s a table which reacts to gestures and allows zooming, pinching and generally messing about with a ridiculously oversized touch screen.

Over the years, however, companies have unveiled ‘solutions’ which extend this functionality to include NFC (Near Field Communications – think Oyster card), and tactile-haptics (think surgeons with 3D patients that respond to digital scalpels).

Whilst this kit has always been ludicrously expensive and generally restricted to research grants, the company Amnesia Razorfish has just developed a solution which can be downloaded on iPhones and iPads. Now all we need is the Microsoft Surface…

To see how social media has moved on, this year we’re hosting a new huddle at the Banner offices. In this information-packed afternoon, marketers will hear from senior technology marketers and vendors about how they’re using social media to drive provable success for their brands in 2010 and beyond.

At the Huddle you’ll discover:

• How to get the most from the available media options

• How to build a social media strategy that ties directly to your business objectives

• And how to go about measuring and proving ROI

You’ll hear the first hand experiences of marketers just like you. What worked. What didn’t. And what they’d do differently next time.

The date for your diary is Tuesday 2nd November. The huddle starts at 2pm at the Banner offices in London and finishes with drinks at 6pm.

Places are free but allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. To ensure you don’t miss out, register now.

And, to give you a taste of what our Huddles are like, here are some photos from last year’s event:

It would be good to see you there.

Whilst it was competitive and fun, that approach seems antiquated by today’s standards. For an agency whose raison d’être is to understand and use technology better than any other agency, scribbling the answers onto bits of paper wasn’t really a good way of tracking progress or educating our team on new technologies.

Walking the walk

So this year we resolved that we should do a treasure hunt using a range of new technologies and social platforms to make the day more fun, interactive and educational. Each team received a rucksack with instructions and a range of clues. In addition, they were all given separate log-ins for YouTube and Flickr, Twitter hash-tags, and access to our home-brewed geo-location platform (a Google Maps mash-up).

To score points, each team needed to answer the questions, update their status using Twitter and upload geo-tagged photos (to prove they’d actually been to every location). Finally, the teams needed to shoot videos of the day using their iPhones, edit using iMovie and upload to YouTube.

For your viewing pleasure, here’s the winning video:

And here are a bunch of fun photos from the day.

Enjoy.

As part of the feedback process on the last event, we asked what people thought of the day, the content and speakers. We also asked what changes they’d like to see in the format of the event in the future and what topics they’d like to see covered.

Perhaps predictably, it was the day’s agenda and calibre of the speaker line-up that attracted most people to the first event. Not to mention it was free to our invitees. Of course our speakers scored very highly, but coming away from the day almost all commented on how much they’d valued the opportunity to network. I’m sure they found it cathartic to share some pain and understand that others out there were trying to overcome the same hurdles.

Three key pieces of feedback came through, which we’ve tried to listen to in putting together the agenda for the forthcoming summit:

1. People want more practical content and less of the theoretical. There’s an appetite for stories of bloodied knuckles, as well as a hunger for real learnings from people who’ve been there and done it. We were very conscious not to make last year’s event a beauty parade of vendors and ensure it was client-side marketers telling their stories. This time round we’re trying to encourage our speakers to tell their success stories, and what mistakes they’d avoid the second time round. As an example, Shawn Burns from SAP is coming along to tell the story of how he and other marketers transformed sap.com from a largely brochureware site to a ‘demand generation machine’. Good stuff.

2. Attendees wanted more opportunity to network and learn from their peers. We had some great table conversations at lunchtime last time round, and we tried to allow generous breaks. For the most part people resisted the lure of their BlackBerries, made conversation and benefited immensely. This time round we’ve gone a bit further and we’ve made the afternoon sessions entirely interactive. Attendees will have the opportunity to attend three out of four workshops on social media, accelerating sales, using webcasting and online video, and measuring and optimising campaigns. We’re going to have people capturing learnings from one group to another so that through the course of the afternoon we generate a body of knowledge which can then be shared with all attendees afterwards.

3. In terms of the content, there was a lot of call for tips on making the most of a credit-crunched budget, using social media and proving a return on marketing activity. Our first speaker of the day, Jim Cassidy, is an ex IBM marketer now at European company StepStone. In his previous life with a budget of millions, his greatest challenge used to be how to spend marketing budget fast enough. He’s now in a position where every penny (cent) has to be accounted for. Jim will talk about what he’s prioritising, how he’s making a case for spend with the board, and how he’s making his marketing assets sweat. We’ve also got a great panel line up, led by Cisco’s Amanda Jobbins. They’re going to give their take on some of these topics.

So hopefully that gives you something of a taster for what’s to come on the 30th April. If you need any more encouragement, the venue we’ve chosen this time is simply stunning — a private member’s club at the top of Centrepoint.

About time you registered I think: www.demandgenerationsummit.com

Remember, we’re only accepting registrations from client-side marketers from the B2B services, technology and telecoms sectors. No offence intended to others, but demand for places is extremely high.

Hopefully see you there.

P.S. If you’re of the twittering kind, you can get regular updates by following us at www.twitter.com/demandgentweet or subscribing to the RSS feed

I love the quote by one of the newspaper guys, “We don’t expect to make any money.”

Also, check out the home user’s modem with the rubber cups to put the phone handset into – the first modem I ever used was almost identical to this.

Those were the days.

Source: NOTCOT

Steve Jobs has been quoted as saying that Apple will wait and see how the market develops. In the meantime we’ve seen new 17″ MacBook Pro’s announced – which are as about as un-netbooky as it’s possible to get in a laptop. Then there are the rather lovely new external screens to go along with the rather lovely MacBook Air – both of which our very own Rod Banner has had gracing his desk in the office (ah the perks of being the Chairman).

But still, it has to be a matter of when rather than if.

To deliver a truly Apple netbook, the company would need to team up a damn-pretty, user-friendly 3G device with a way for users to work primarily online.

The device shouldn’t be a problem – although the question is whether it would look like a scaled down MacBook Air or a scaled up iPhone. Or perhaps a dual-screen clamshell offering a couple of multitouch screens that can adapt to differing uses (ok, calm down now). As a sideline, chip-maker Freescale has been reported as getting ready to ship Apple just the sort of processor such as device will run on.

The there’s the whole online experience part. Certainly, there’s plenty of options already around from Google, Adobe, Zoho etc. But then Apple simply faces the same problem as Microsoft as it kisses a chunk of software revenue goodbye. They will want to deliver a distinctively Apple experience.

So it was interesting to note in yesterday’s announcements the new version of iWork (Apple’s Office clone) which now features iWork.com, an online sharing space – although not yet offering online versions of the software. Team this up with the MobileMe platform and a new stripped down OSX (as promised by the next release Snow Leopard) and it gets more interesting. Then add a netbook App Store (similar to Linux’s Apt Get feature) and it’s pretty close to being job done.

But when? That’s the real question.

For me, the more successful interfaces these days are the ones that minimise the role of the device – that quite literally narrow the gap between the user and the information they need. Adaptive Path’s Aurora interface, part of an initiative by Mozilla Labs, does this quite well in the way it uses relative size and perspective/depth to show the most appropriate information. However, the stacking of information around the frame and the new selection tool feel too rooted in the old desktop and mouse metaphor to really move things forward.

More interesting to me is the bookmarking and history concept – also on the Mozilla page. The inclusion of context elements to jog your memory is inspired and the timeline design is very pretty.