SnapTell Blog

Bridging the Print and Digital Worlds

In an article in MinOnline, a media industry newsletter, Steve Smith writes about how SnapTell's Snap.Send.Get mobile marketing solution moblized the August issue of Men's Health Magazine.

Snipped from Smith's article:

Quick question: Other than text messaging, what is the most popular mobile data feature?

Mobile browsing? Nope. According to comScore, only 14.4% of mobile customers look for information on the mobile Web.

Gaming? Not even close, since only 9.1% of us played a game in the last month on our phone.

Answer: Sending and receiving photos or video on the phone (23.9%) is not only the most popular mobile media activity, but it is also the fastest growing, up 60% year-over-year in comScore's April mobile benchmarks.

For marketers and media folks, the takeaway here is that consumers are almost as comfortable snapping and sending pics as they are text messaging, and that opens up an important pathway.

Smith details the use of SnapTell in Men's Health magazine's August issue and highlights an important benefit of mobilizing all the ads in a magazine issue with Snap.Send.Get -- the ease of re-purposing existing advertising collateral for use with Snap.Send.Get and the strength of ubiquity :

Readers get a single call to action on page 11--a full-page Stop Right There... message instructing them how to interact with all the ads ... all of the ads are snappable and every interaction is the same.

This is unlike SMS, where every ad has its own short code and all the ad copy needs to be changed. An SMS trigger in an ad requires some additional copy and explanation that can get in the way of those rock hard D&G abs. The alternative method of interacting with physical media is the 2D scan code, which usually requires specific in-camera software and a butt-ugly digital bar code on the sand next to those, well, rock-hard D&G abs.

Smith concludes:

Bridging the print and digital worlds has been a longstanding goal of publishers. Ultimately, I have no doubt at all that the mobile phone will act much like a computer mouse on the physical environment. It will activate the physical world to deliver information and offers to the device.

The Future Of Print -- Our Take

Esquire magazine will be marking its 75^th year of publication this September with an electronic cover.

According to an article in The New York Times the cover will flash “the 21st Century Begins Now,” thanks in part to a tiny battery inserted in the magazine cover. The batteries will be inserted by hand into each magazine cover, and shipped to Esquire distributors in refrigerated trucks to preserve battery life. If all goes well the magazine will be flashing its message for 90 days.

"I hope it will be in the Smithsonian,” David Granger, Esquire’s editor in chief, told the Times reporter.

Granger also said, according to the Times article, that he “knows some will see the cover as a gimmick — but he says he thinks the technology behind it, which has been used for supermarket displays but never embedded in a magazine, speaks to the possibilities of print."

"Magazines have basically looked the same for 150 years,” Granger told the Times reporter. “I have been frustrated with the lack of forward movement in the magazine industry ... the possibilities of print have just begun. In two years, I hope this looks like cellphones did in 1982, or car phones.”

And speaking of cellphones …

We think the most promising possibility of print is technology that transforms it into a truly interactive medium. Rather than flashing a message at readers, we believe it’s more interesting and effective to interact with them. Granted we’re prejudiced here, as our Snap.Send.Get technology does exactly that -- Snap.Send.Get transforms static print into a lively two-way conversation.

If you want to see another glimpse of the tech-enabled potentials of print advertising, pick up a copy of the July/August issue of Men’s Health, the first magazine in America to offer fully interactive advertising throughout the entire issue. We posted more about Men’s Health and SnapTell here. Rolling Stone magazine also recently used SnapTell’s Snap.Send.Get to interact with its readers.

To find out more about SnapTell’s Snap.Send.Get mobile marketing platform, please email us at [email protected]. And congratulations on your 75th anniversary Esquire -- we hope to hear from you soon.

New Life For Old Ads

In this video interview with business news site BNET TV, Adam Schneider, Vice President, Sales, discusses ways that publishers and brand owners can use SnapTell's Snap.Send.Get solution to bring new life to ads that are, as Adam says, "just lying there dead on the page."

Adam also talks about recent changes he's seen in the mobile marketing space and the ways that SnapTell-enabled ads enables brand owners, publishers and marketers to collect actionable metrics which they can then use to finetune their marketing efforts on the fly and enrich the ways they connect with consumers.

Mobile Marketing - getting from here to there

RCR Wireless News has an opinion piece by Louis Gump, VP Mobile, The Weather Channel Interactive, on the state of mobile advertising. Gump cites the sort of stats that tend to be front and center in such pieces  -- JupiterResearch report predicted that mobile marketing in the U.S. alone will grow to $2.2 billion in 2012, up from $708 million in 2007 -- but moves quickly to the broader and more interesting question of where exactly the industry is today; how do we get there from here?

 

For some answers to that question Gump turned to INmobile, an online community of mobile executives. Snipped from Gump’s piece:

We posed the question where is mobile advertising on its growth curve? The majority of responses indicate that it is still early, but that the growth has begun to be noticeable. Specifically, 54% of respondents say that mobile marketing is an innovative tactic with occasional business impact. Of the rest, 38% say we are in early experimentation only, while 6% feel that it is now a significant platform for leading marketers and 2% say that it is an established part of the marketing mix.

 

There was a broad recognition that some big brands are using mobile to their advantage. However, the rationale for those who feel that we are in the earlier stages believe that many companies have not yet added a line item for mobile in their marketing budgets; the common definition of mobile advertising is broad; and many people are still hungry for metrics.