SnapTell Blog

SnapTell+Popular Science -- Best Of What's New

Hustle off to the newsstand and grab a copy of the December issue of Popular Science magazine, which features the 21st annual "Best of What's New" review. The magazine describes it as "a celebration of our wildest technological dreams" and spotlights dozens of "long awaited or completely unexpected, (and) equally amazing" recent scientific and engineering breakthroughs.

Even better: Popular Science used SnapTell's Snap.Send.Get solution to make the entire Best Of What's New section interactive -- just use your camera phone to snap a picture of any of the pages (see the magazine for specifics), send the image to [email protected] (AT&T, Verizon and Alltell users can send via shortcode 070707) -- and you'll get a spiffy digital image of a vintage Popular Science cover, an instant response from some of the Best Of What's New award-winning companies, and a chance to win a Garmin nüvi 500 GPS device.

SnapTell Hits The Road With Harley Davidson

Harley-Davidson is launching its 2009 V-Rod Muscle bike with an innovative marketing campaign featuring American super model Marisa Miller and SnapTell’s Snap.Send.Get mobile marketing platform.

 

The campaign went live on October 13^th in magazines such as GQ, Esquire, Playboy, Complex, Road & Track and Trader, with ads featuring Miller reclining on a sleek, black V-Rod Muscle. Snap a picture of the ad with your camera phone, send the picture in an MMS to the number cited in the ad, and you get access to exclusive content from Harley Davidson.

 

The campaign was pre-launched on Oct. 6 on Harley-Davidson’s official YouTube channel, with a “making of” video that takes viewers behind the scenes at the Marisa Miller V-Rod Muscle photo shoot . Motorcycle bloggers and Harley-Davidson fans and friends on Facebook and MySpace were exclusively tipped off to the campaign. 

 

SnapTell is pleased to be part of this iconic brand's marketing campaign. For more information on the new V-Rod Muscle visit Harley Davidson's website.   To find out more about SnapTell’s Snap. Send. Get mobile marketing solution, please email us and/or visit our website.

 

Snap, Send, Get ... Score!

Are you ready for some …. great giveaways?

ESPN The Magazine partnered with SnapTell to create an interactive magazine packed full of sports-themed free rewards. To reap the bounty readers simply explore the pages of the ESPN The Magazine’s NFL Preview Issue (September 2008), use their camera phones to snap a picture of ads that offer the rewards they are interested in, send the picture to SnapTell via MMS, and they'll get their goodies immediately.

The rewards offered include:

SportsCenter ringtone
Breaking sports news, scoring and fantasy team alerts
NFL Live ringtone
Vodka Recipe from Absolut Los Angeles
Free standard shipping on purchases
College Football ringtone
Free Can of Campbell’s Chunky Soup
Converse One Star Ringtone

Plus, every reader who snaps and sends a picture of any SnapTell-activated ad in the NFL Preview Issue is automatically has a chance to win a trip for two to Tampa, Florida for the ESPN The Magazine Next ’09 Big Weekend Event, starting Friday, January 30 2009.

Brands participating include Progressive, Sony, GMC Sierra, Absolut Los Angeles, Under Armour, Toyota, Wolverine, Campbell’s, Converse, Target, HBO, Mobil, and Champs.

Advertisers get significant benefits as well, including real-time, personalized, interactive on-demand brand communication with their target audience and additional exposure in the magazine.

To find out more about SnapTell’s mobile marketing platform, and how it enables brand owners, marketers and publishers to easily mobilize existing advertising collateral, please email us and/or visit our website.

 

Back By Popular Demand: SnapTell+Rolling Stone

SnapTell-activated ads are returning to the pages of Rolling Stone, after our successful debut in the magazine last May.

Selected ads in Rolling Stone issue #1062, now on newsstands, have been made interactive with  SnapTell's Snap.Send.Get mobile marketing platform. Readers can look for the SnapTell logo in ads throughout the issue, and then use their camera phones to Snap a picture of the ads that interest them, Send the picture to SnapTell, and Get special promotional offers and/or content such as:

A chance to win a Pulsar watch
Exclusive wallpaper or video clip from Sci Fi
A killer pick-up line from Pentel
Free Deep Cleaning Shampoo sample from Gillette
A chance to win a $50 voucher from Greyhound
Exclusive ringtone from Energizer ® Advanced Lithium

But wait; there’s more! Everyone who snaps and sends a picture of any of the SnapTell-enabled ads in the magazine is also automatically entered to win a trip to an upcoming Rolling Stone Live concert.

Readers of Rolling Stone aren't the only ones to benefit of course. SnapTell's "Snap.Send.Get" mobile marking solution transforms static print ads -- or any existing marketing collateral -- into a measurable, two-way communication tool for brand owners. For more information on our Snap.Send. Get mobile marketing platform, please visit our website or email us.

SnapTell Goes Storm Chasing

Attention adrenaline addicts: the Discovery Channel’s Storm Chasers show will be returning to a TV near you in mid-October! The coming season features new high-tech tricked-out vehicles, new teams and new strategies for delving into the heart of Mother Nature’s most intense experiences without getting your face and/or assorted appendages ripped off in the process.

And to soothe your Storm Chaser needs until the new season premiers on October 19th (Sundays at 10 p.m), pick up a copy of Wired Magazine’s October issue (on sale now). There’s a great ad from Discovery Channel with information on one of the coolest Storm Chaser trucks, a dictionary of weird weather terms (do you know what a “Wedge” is? Animal Precipitation? Anvil Zits? If not, you will after you read the insert).

And there’s also a terrific bonus offer that will totally blow you away: Snap a picture of the ad using your phone’s camera, Send it in an MMS to [email protected], and you’ll almost instantly Get an exclusive Storm Chasers clip on your mobile phone.

The Discovery channel used SnapTell’s Snap.Send.Get mobile marketing platform to power their Storm Chaser clip offering. Snap.Send.Get can turn any image associated with a brand into a dynamic mobile marketing campaign. 100% permission-based, Snaptell’s Snap.Send.Get mobile marketing solution enables brand owners and retailers to communicate directly with consumers, within seconds of the consumer's request for information. For more information, please email SnapTell.

Request-Based Mobile Marketing

The Los Angeles Times ran an article yesterday on a new mobile marketing study researching whether people were comfortable receiving ads on their mobile phones.

The study, conducted by Local Mobile Search (an advisory service of Opus Research) states that about 43% of people interviewed were amenable to receiving "offers or deals" on their phones, but only if they could select which merchants send them offers.

This shows a great deal of possibility around mobile advertising," said Greg Sterling, a senior analyst with Local Mobile Search. "A lot of surveys have been done that show that people are just not really interested in mobile advertising. But if you give people assurances that they have some measure of control, then they become much more interested.

"We're at a tipping point. The best days for mobile ads are in front of us." Advertising has to be relevant, meaningful and creative, Sterling  said. If it gives people something of value to them, he said, they're not opposed to it.

It’s not hard to grasp why permission-based mobile marketing is the way to go for a number of reasons, most important among them that you run no risk of infuriating a potential customer by stuffing their mobile phone full of unsolicited ads.

SnapTell’s Snap.Send.Get mobile marketing platform takes the idea of permission-based marketing one step further and makes it request-based, people see only the marketing content that they implicitly ask to receive.

Promo Magazine on SnapTell's Snap.Send.Get

We instinctively shudder at any mention of the immensely silly CueCat, but we really liked this piece in Promo Magazine.

Snipped from the article:

Anyone whose memories of the Internet economy extend back to sock-puppet spokesmen and sites devoted to toys should remember the CueCat, a cat-shaped handheld barcode reader that plugged into the computer. It allowed users to scan special barcodes in print magazines or on product packages and get linked to a URL offering more information about the story or product.

CueCat is now an answer in the dot-com version of Trivial Pursuit. But interactive print is back and building momentum, thanks to the CueCat already in everyone's hand, so to speak: the mobile phone. Several tech platforms are taking different roads to incorporate mobile phone capabilities — text messaging and cameras — into offline marketing, and in the process building a new backchannel for print, broadcast or out-of-home promotions.

For example, pick up the current July/August issue of Men's Health magazine and you'll find that you can get coupons, samples, content or just product information simply by taking pictures of any of the ads and sending the photos as multimedia messages to [email protected].

Clicking a photo of an ad for a Dolce & Gabbana men's cologne, for example, returns a text message containing a URL for retailer Macy's and a discount offer on shipping for the $70 product. Snapping an ad for Westin Hotels & Resorts produces a vacation-themed ringtone download. And an ad for the Chevy Malibu produces a link to a mobile site offering very full product specs and consumer reviews of the latest model.

Other brands taking part in the Men's Health initiative include Honda Motors, Anheuser-Busch, Quaker Oats, The Coca-Cola Co. and Procter & Gamble.

Tech provider SnapTell maintains a server housing the image-recognition software that detects which ad the user photographed and also manages the database of marketer messages. “Both those elements are important,” says Adam Schneider, sales vice president for SnapTell. “We have a 99% image-matching rate, but if you don't send the relevant content back, then that [rate] doesn't mean anything.”

SnapTell licensed the technology to Men's Health publisher Rodale, which then used the enhanced interactivity in sales pitches to its usual advertisers.

“This treats mobile not as a standalone channel, but as an integrated enhancement to other forms of advertising,” Schneider says. He says SnapTell will power portions of a Rolling Stone print issue this fall — its second partnership with that magazine after an integration last September.

Mobile Marketing Around the Web

• Mediabistro.com has launched three new blogs: MobileMarketingToday.Com, MobileDevicesToday.com and MobileAppsToday.com, which join Media Bisto's MobileContentToday.com blog. Mobile Marketing Today looks like it will be a great place to keep up with the good, the bad and the just plain odd in the mobile marketing world.

• We're wondering why Ralph Lauren is making its customers download software and scan barcodes to "quickly" access the brand's new mobile shopping site -- Lauren figures that people will happily "use their phone to scan barcodes on ads in magazines, and even in store windows," according to an article in Pocket Lint. SnapTell's Snap.Send.Get could have effortlessly whisked customers to the Lauren site, all they'd need to do is snap pictures of the products in question. Our solution works on any phone, and requires no software download, no scanning of barcodes, no adding ugly barcodes to ads and window displays.

• AT&T wants mobile app developers in New England to create the Next Great Mobile Application, in what the company is describing as "a high-tech version of 'American Idol. The grand prize winner gets $10,000 in cash and a slot on the AT&T devCentral Web site, plus the application will be promoted in all AT&T-owned stores in New England. National versions of the Fast-Pitch program have resulted in such apps as Ascendo Fitness, My Local TV News Over Wireless and Mobile Comic Books by uclick, this is AT&T's first regional challenge. Better move fast, the contest ends September 30th -- see the entry information here.

 

Publishers Weekly On Vroengard Academy

Publishers Weekly has a detailed article analyzing the success of Random House’s Vroengard Academy, a virtual world and online game based on the wildly popular Inheritance cycle novels by Christopher Paolini.

SnapTell’s Snap.Send.Get mobile marketing platform is being used to power some of Vroengard Academy's online and offline scavenger hunts; players must figure out clues, search for specific items and then snap pictures of the items with a camera phone and send them to the academy via MMS.

From the Publishers Weekly article:

The game launched June 2, and more than 20,000 users signed up in the first three weeks; the number has since doubled to more than 41,000. “We’re really excited about that number,” says Linda Leonard, director of new media marketing at RHCB. “It’s definitely in line with where we wanted to go.”

According to Leonard, there is a 45% return rate among users, which shows the number of players revisiting to the site to check their progress and complete weekly challenges. She adds that a return rate of this level is high for this kind of campaign, and that there is strong participation among girls, with a 60/40 split between male and female players.

A two-week viral marketing campaign, which involved a “lost dog”-style teaser poster campaign, led up to the game’s launch. Once the game started, Random introduced three additional promotions in U.S. cities throughout the summer. During the first of these, sites in Austin and San Francisco were painted with Vroengard Academy murals, and street teams passed out 5,000 flash drives, which contained a “lost chapter” from Eragon, as well as an audio clip from Paolini. Online maps directed fans to the giveaway locations.

During two subsequent periods—one in mid-June and one earlier this month—10,000 additional flash drives were distributed at locations in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Boston and Chicago. The later flash drives contained additional unique series information: the third, for instance, included an excerpt from Brisingr, which could only be unlocked after solving a clue in the Vroengard Academy. As Leonard puts it, “We wanted to give the fan base content they could enjoy and interact with all summer, and really make this an event for them.”

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.