Yes we scan! Marketing with QR Codes

About 2 years ago I dubbed QR codes* a dead concept outside of Japan.

To take off, the technology would need to be embedded in every smartphone operating system and two years ago this did not happen. Even though it is easy to download an app that reads QR codes using the phone’s camera, the app needs to be opened separately every time. To make it simple and encourage people to us it every day, the reader must be fully integrated with the camera.

Today penetration of QR code readers is as low as 1% in the US and Europe while it amounts to 70% in Japan (Source: IMC). This is slowly changing while more device manufacturers embed QR code readers directly to the phone. Based on current trends I might have been wrong. Examples of devices with embedded QR readers are the Motorola Droid and all Blackberry OS 6.x+, though slightly oddly placed in Blackberry App World rather than in the camera menu.

The big advantage of QR codes -when they work- is that they provide an instant method to interact with a brand without having to type a single letter or number. Just point your camera at it - that’s all!

Where to use QR-codes

1.       Product Packaging

As they are still relatively new for the masses, QR codes on a product raise curiosity and call to action. Curiosity and the flair of “new and cool” increase the willingness to interact with the brand – a great opportunity that shall be rewarded from the brand side.

The code can redirect to a website or microsite, providing relevant information about the product without interrupting the package design too much. Or it can extend the brand experience in-store as well as outside. Coca Cola for example added QR codes to coke cans this spring in Germany, redirecting customers to a music portal. Selected music of participating bands added another sensual dimension to the coke experience and at the same time promoted the Coke Sound Up campaign they were running at the time. Read article

2.       Outdoor and posters, TV ads

QR codes on posters or billboards can, just like in-store, provide more information about the car, TV-show, movie or whatever the product might be. Other than in- store though, users will expect something fancy to happen and might be disappointed to “only” find plain product info and package slips. The code can be used to distribute coupons, unveil videos or other digital gimmicks. Important is to raise curiosity for the content and give an idea what to expect.

Calvin Klein for instance got loads of media attention with giant billboards on popular places around the US, like Times Square, New York, featuring a QR code with the headline “Get It Uncensored”. The code gave access to a sexy mobile video with model Lara Stone and was a huge success. Read article

Paramount Pictures used QR codes to give by passers instant access to the trailer of the new Indiana Jones movie and at the same time provided coupons for popcorn at the theatre to drive traffic to theatres. See example

3.       Magazines, Brochures, Business cards

Other than leading to a web- or microsite, QR codes can be used to invoke writing an e-mail, call a phone number or send a SMS message. “Scan to win” campaigns require the user to fill in personal information. Magazines and brochures therefore are the perfect medium since they are mostly read at a quiet, private place, where people feel save and are more likely to share those kind of info.

4.       Indoor & Outdoor points of interest

Points of interest like Museums and parks can let the visitors decide for themselves when they want more information about a painting, the place or other exhibitions. It is a fun way to engage younger audiences that are already tight to the mobile medium and extend the available information, providing media like audio guides, videos, text and images.

The World Park campaign for example invited visitors of New York’s Central Park to interact with the park’s history and offerings. Over 50 QR Codes were placed all over the park and provided user with multi- media information about the current location. This includes former exhibitions, concerts, film scenes shot at the exact same spot, but also information about flora and fauna or the history of the park. Watch Video

5.       Sharing

You want to share a great app or mobile website with someone right next to you. Rather than sending a text message or email with the link the app displays the QR code which the other person reads using the camera and the download starts or mobile website is displayed almost instantly.

Conclusion:

In conclusion there are some great opportunities with QR codes for mobile but we don't see a big boom in usage uptake in the near future. First device manufacturers must integrate the functionality into the core camera function of all their devices. In the meantime we recommend using a combination of SMS short codes, mobile website address, search and QR codes to help people easily find and access your app or mobile website.

QR codes are can work as a bridge between different marketing channels. It is an easy way to provide a multi- media and therefore more intense brand experience. Curiosity can be an engaging factor en be turned real interaction with the brand. Important to keep in mind though, that the delivered experience shall be coherent with the brand’s image. If you redirect to a website, it should be optimised for mobile, since otherwise the user may get frustrated.

-          Call- to– action with coupons, vouchers, store locator, etc.

-          Redirect to other media website, social media sites,  etc.

-          Give added value such as games, videos, pics, etc.

-          Provide more information

And there are lots of other great examples in the blog post 101 uses of QR codes and 50 creative uses of QR codes.

* QR which stands for “Quick Response” was created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. A QR Code is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code).

For further reading Proximity London has a great article on QR codes available here:

SIME Barcelona Wrap Up: The Universal Yes, Press Release and Two Pizza Rule

Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels, explains three keys to driving success at Amazon

Golden Gekko’s recently attended SIME Barcelona, an event that brought together thought leaders from around the globe to discuss the latest trends in digital. The event featured an impressive array of entrepreneurs, investors and marketing professionals from various industries including media, telecom, e-commerce and mobile.

The event was highly inspirational. Countless tales of entrepreneurial successes and failures make any corporate drone dream of quitting their job and founding the next Google in their garage. Highlights from the day included co-founder of Flickr, Caterina Fake. She candidly recounted how the start-up overcame early obstacles and financial woes (think - mortgaging the house to keep business afloat) to beat the odds. Now Flickr is one of the world’s most popular photo sharing websites. Another memorable story was told by John Hanke, VP of Geo at Google. Hanke vividly retold the story of pitching the “crazy concept” of a 3D map of the globe to Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Google Earth has now been downloaded by over 700 million unique users. 

While these talks were inspiring, the highlight of the day and most tangible takeaways were delivered by Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels. Mr. Vogel outlined three bold management strategies that have propelled Amazon to success and could be worth considering for your organization as well:

·         The Universal Yes – In order to encourage innovation and empower employees, Amazon has implemented a policy whereby all new ideas presented will be given the go ahead. If a co-worker disagrees with the idea, he/she must write a 6-page report outlining their reasoning. This a clear break from the traditional norm in large corporations where new ideas are many times suppressed or rejected with little explanation. This attitude has helped Amazon continuously to be a leader in innovation.

·         Two Pizza Rule – Large, global corporations face tough challenges. In order to effectively tackle issues, Vogel argues that problems should be broken down and divided among smaller teams: teams no bigger than two large pizzas can feed. This way, teams can focus and isolate on a specific issue without being bogged down in corporate bureaucracy. 

·         Press Release – As everyone knows, Amazon prides itself on being customer centric. Before making a business decision, Amazon always asks, “How will this add value for our customers?” In this spirit, Vogel explained their atypical product development process, which starts with a mock press release and FAQ of the new product. Writing a press release and FAQ document before the development phase forces developers to envision the end result of the product and how it will be received by customers. This important step in the process helps Amazon align new products with customer needs.

Overall, SIME Barcelona was a great break from the daily grind to listen and reflect on the rapidly changing digital industry. It’s amazing to see how quickly the digital landscape is evolving and we were encouraged to repeatedly hear that mobile apps will be an ever-growing force. We look forward to attending next year.


By Anna Satterfield, Jeffrey McAndrew and Charles Murphy

Money in Mobile- Key Insights from the BLN conference

The world becomes a bit more mobile each day. Brands need to catch up and show creativity in using mobile for business. The Business Leader Network, BLN, called for ideas and inspiration in a one-day conference in London, June 14th dubbed “Money in Mobile”. Renowned experts and entrepreneurs from the mobile business were invited to share their knowledge and insights with leading consumer brands, seeking innovative strategies for how to mobilize their brand.
I attended the seminar together with speakers from Google, Tesco and Snaptu (recently acquired by Facebook) and had a great discussion at the panel. Here are the most interesting insights:

Jeremy Coop from market research company Comscore shared his key insights:

Browser and Apps are head to head in general usage or traffic but there are enormous differences depending on the brand:
- Sky has 83% of traffic through apps
- BBC has 89% of traffic through mobile web

Operator are still among the top mobile websites
- Vodafone group was the 4th most visited mobile website in the uk (6th in time spent online)
- Telefonica/ O2 was the 5th (11th in time spent online)

Here is the graph for minute spent on mobile sites

Most used apps by reach and not traffic
1. Google maps
2. Yahoo weather (pre-embedded on all iPhones)
3. Facebook
4. Google (other)
5. Youtube
6. Ebay
7. Yahoo stocks
8. BBC
9. Sky
10. Whatsapp
11. Shazam

Social networking stats
- Social networking spearheads mobile usage, in Europe most and foremost the UK : 40% of mobile traffic in minutes is generated by Facebook, according to Comscore
- Apps drive social networking: 160% increase in apps vs 25% increase for browser the last year
- 96.6% of checkins are through Facebook. Checkins through foursquare feature second place with 2.5%
The minutes spend on Facebook from a mobile phone surpass thosem the page is being accessed from a Desktop Computer.

Other UK stats
- Every month mobile counts 13 billion page views
90% of iPhone users use apps vs 39% of Symbian users
- 70% of mobile users in Europe don't use apps (but 30% do)

Comscore and GSMA get mobile usage data from operators in the UK to track
top mobile sites.

Ilja from Getjar presented insights on how to make money from mobile apps. Here are some of the key things we picked up:

- Revenue from paid app is increasing but proportionally going down. Ads and virtual goods grow significantly from 2009 (4.1bn USD) to 2012 (17.5 Bn USD). The biggest growth is in advertising followed by virtual goods.

- The entire music industry generate 25bn USD per year in comparison

Brief guide on what monetization model should you use
- High Utility and low stickiness = paid
- Low utility, high stickiness and moderate user value = ad based
- High utility and high stickiness and high user value = Freemium incl. virtual goods, in-app payments and subscription

Other payment insights
- Billing conversion is a key component of deciding business model (paid vs ads)
- 7x higher payment conversion for one button purchase vs premium SMS
- Revenue share from advertising vs. paid model (e.g. India has very low pay-out)
- Marketability - potential reach should decided monetization method (free, freemium or paid)

Other key insights
- Angry Bird was the 57th game of a 10 year old gaming company and very carefully planned
- Symbian ad spend dropped to almost zero when Nokia announced the drop of Symbian even if it is in 2016.

Location Based Is Not A Service

Ric Ferraro, Account Director at Golden Gekko, gives a resume of his speech at AppWorks in Oslo

OSLO- Appworks is one of the leading mobile conferences in Scandinavia (organized by Mobilen.no, famous for their Telecruise conference that takes place on a cruise ship) and it was a real pleasure to speak about Location-Aware apps during the 1-day event at the end of May.

The conference attracted a great mix of mobile entrepreneurs, developers and 'big guns' like Samsung, LG, Blackberry, Nokia and HTC, with a conference format running in parallel to a workshop format (Klubbscenen).

Location-based services were one of the main items on the day's agenda, so it was perhaps provocative of me to kick off my keynote by stating that Location-Based Services were extinct today. The reasons for stating this is that location is no longer a service but a feature that is embedded everywhere. You can see the full slide deck here:

App works olso location everywhere 05.2011 rf slideshare

View more presentations from Ric Ferraro

Location on mobile is also firmly in the mainstream today -with Facebook in particular achieving what Foursquare couldn't.I'm a big believer in the fact that contextual search (with mobile apps knowing what I'm more likely to be interested in according to time of day, previous searches, ambient temperature etc) will unlock the full potential of location. It is still early days for this, but as Google (and others) invest in research in this area and processing power on mobile devices keeps increasing, we will see some real examples of this soon.

There were some great presentations at the event by other speakers - I particularly enjoyed the ones by John Valentine (from SCVNGR), Megan Miller (on usability of iPad apps) and Ola Larsen (from RIM). Ola showed a video that I thought was pretty cool, on Hyper-Augmented Reality. You can see the video below and get an insight into what one version of the future of AR could be like. Enjoy!

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Key iOS 5 Developer features - a CEO’s perspective

Most of the news leaving the hallowed halls of the Moscone West building in San Francisco, where Apple’s Developer Conference - WWDC 2011 - is taking place, centres around the announcement of iOS 5 and its fluffy new features and services such as iCloud, iMessage, Newsstand, and Reminders. Surprisingly, very little has been reported on the major technical improvements in iOS 5 from a developer perspective. And iOS 5 has a lot of big improvements for developers.

Here are the features that I truly believe will make a major improvement to a developer’s life:

1. Notification Center

One of the main complaints over iOS in the last six months has been the inflation of push notifications that disturb the user experience with an iPhone or iPad. Notification Center in iOS 5 builds on the existing notification system with provisioning now built right into Xcode, making it easier to implement.

With the new Notification Center in iOS 5 you can display and manage notifications without interrupting the user. The user can see all notifications in a single place via the Notification Center from the home screen or from any app by swiping down the status bar. When the user gets a new notification it will briefly appear at the top of the screen instead of a popup. The lock screen also displays the notifications so you can respond to them quickly with just a swipe.

To read more about the Notification Center visit here. 

2. Automatic Reference Counting (ARC)

I might be going out on a limb here, but in my opinion the ARC is what is normally referred to as garbage collector. One of the key complaints by Android developers, particularly when developing for iOS, is the difficult of memory management in iOS.  This also affects users since apps constantly crash.  With ARC though, the developer no longer needs to be an expert in memory management as the compiler does the job for you.  In theory this should allow apps to run faster and more reliably. Whether it will make apps more stable in general or cause developers to become sloppy remains to be seen.

3. Twitter integration
To be fair this has been one of the main features discussed in the media. But I believe this is more due to the fact that the media loves Twitter.  What they don’t say though is that Android has supported Twitter and other social networking integration for over a year, as Android allows apps to interact with each other.  Nevertheless, iOS now provides the key features of Twitter as well.  The deep integration allows the association of a Twitter account within iOS settings. So now the integration with an app does not have to be done by the user by logging in and or adding an account manually.  Since most apps nowadays provide sharing through Twitter, this will enhance the user’s experience enormously.

4. Core Image

During the last year some of the coolest and most popular apps have been photo editing or photo filtering apps such as Instagram, Hipstamatic, Camerabag, Photogene and many more. Core Image provides a framework for editing images and videos, making it a lot easier to implement these features into any app.  In addition to this, the framework is tightly integrated with the hardware to make performance even better.

5. OpenGL ES

The new OpenGL capabilities are what really excite game developers and 3D animators.

With the GL Kit in iOS 5 the capabilities for advanced rendering and texture techniques have become even better, and we are yet to see how those capabilities can be utilised.

6. PC Free

The sixth and last feature I want to highlight has little to do with the developer SDK but may turn out to become one of the biggest advantages.  Today the majority of users upgrade to the latest iOS within the first couple of months. Some though, will still stick to an older version and cause headaches for developers in terms of backwards interoperability support.  Hopefully PC Free will be so tempting a feature that only a small share of users will remain with older versions of the OS. Unfortunately, however, Apple also announced that the oldest iPhones cannot be upgraded to iOS 5 so some legacy issues will still remain.

So there you have a CEO’s perspective on iOS 5.  Let’s start making use of it when it’s launched (hopefully) in September.

Golden Gekko is attending WWDC but it seems, playing with the SDK and Apple’s other new toys has kept them too busy to give us a full report yet.

NFC and Co.: The Most Promising Mobile Payment Solutions

NFC has created a lot of buzz lately. But will Near- Field –Communication become the number one solution for all mobile payments? The last 6-12 months showed the mobile payment ecosystem is taking shape with or without NFC. As operators, banks and credit card companies still fight over the biggest piece of the NFC revenue cake, other standards as proprietary and complementary technologies are developing at a much faster pace.

The term “Mobile Payment” refers to all payments and transactions carried out from and through a mobile phone for services, content and physical goods.

1. Credit card payments
Credit card payment is without a doubt the most common mobile payment solution. Apple is one of the biggest providers, using iTunes as the standard method for all payments other than vouchers. Credit card payment is also the standard method for most if not all m-Commerce applications, including retailers, travel bookings and more. One of the barriers for making credit card payments through mobile apps easy, is the requirement of PKI certification. This usually costs the developer up to 50.000 euro or more. Most merchants and developers get around installing a proper in-app solution by using a website or mobile website for the payment part. The disadvantage hereby
is that the user in most cases has to enter a lot of data every time they make a payment.

2. Premium SMS payments
Still a very widely used payment method for micropayments is Premium SMS. It is broadly used for instance for parking, bus tickets, content purchases, vending machines, etc. To make this work operators in several countries (Finland, Sweden, Denmark, UK, etc) have changed their standard revenue share models and created what resembles a credit card payment. The main handicap is the limit of about 5 euro per transaction, which restricts long term growth. But the simplicity of premium SMS payments for small and simple things should not be underestimated.

3. Paypal
Paypal was actually founded based on the concept of mobile money transfers between PDAs before it was evolved to its current service. It’s deployment for mobile payment therefore means a return to its roots. Being an established brand with a trusted technology and over 100m users put Paypal into a pole position for becoming a major mobile payment player. Nevertheless most users have never made use of Paypal on their mobile.

Paypal is used as the standard method for Blackberry World. But still most Paypal transactions take place on eBay and Skype. Recently Paypal sued Google for copying their mobile payment technology. Paypal however, is not likely to benefit from the trial in terms of growing usage of the platform. Yet Paypal has a massive growth potential in the mobile payment space thanks to its secure and easy payments, leveraging direct links to bank accounts.

4. Google Wallet
Wherever there is an opportunity to collect customer data, Google will come running. For the last couple of years Google has slowly grown Google Checkouts as a solution for online stores. Now they are rapidly moving into the mobile payment space leveraging the growth of Android. The most recent initiative is a partnership with several of the top banks in the US, providing built-in NFC chips and NFC stickers attached to the back of Android devices. A lot more will certainly follow soon.

5. Square
Thanks to the partnership with and support from Apple, Square as become a leading player in the mobile payment space. One of the interesting things about Square is that it enables small businesses to accept credit card payments in a very cost efficient way. The only props needed are a standard iPad, iPhone or Android device and a small reader that can be plugged into the audio jack.

6. Local partnerships/ initiatives between operators and banks
Some markets have been quicker than others to establish mobile payment solutions. First and foremost Japan and Korea act as the leaders in this space. Similar initiatives in Belgium and France put those local markets ahead of the game on a European level. Partnerships and standards though are usually local with limited potential to grow beyond their domestic market.

Other interesting companies to watch for mobile payment include mFoundry, Zong, Boku, etc.

So what about NFC then?
NFC is really an enabler and not a mobile payment platform or method. The success of NFC will depend on device manufacturer adopting the technology as well as the integration of banks and credit card companies. It is also interesting to note that the implementations are primarily being driven by companies that monitor and store customer behaviour and data (e.g. Google). This may not always be in the interest of the end users. Nevertheless, penetration of NFC is increasing and we believe that it has a good chance to become a key enabler for mobile payments in the future. In the meantime however, mobile payments will happen with or without NFC.