SnapTell Blog

SnapTell And Us Weekly

SnapTell is in glitzy company this week. Us Weekly, a celebrity and entertainment news magazine, has used SnapTell's Snap.Send.Get mobile marketing platform to mobilize select ads in its current issue.

Readers use their camera phones to Snap any of the interactive ads in the issue, Send the image to [email protected], will Get a chance to win a trip to attend an Us Weekly celebrity luncheon. Each Snap.Send.Get-enabled ad also offers readers free goodies -- including exclusive ringtones, and chances to win holiday gift baskets and gift certificates from leading retailers.

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.

The Tao Of The GET -- Mobile Marketing Insight From SnapTell

Here at SnapTell we spend a lot of time thinking and talking about what we call the GET -- the content that a brand offers to consumers as part of an interactive image-recognition based marketing campaign. Here’s what we’ve learned about the type of content that tends to spark a consumer’s interest, inspiring them to reach out to an advertiser and initiate a conversation.

The GET Has To Be Good
This seems painfully obvious, but it’s sometimes overlooked: if the GET isn’t appealing consumers won’t bother to connect. Conversely if the GET is interesting, amusing or unique, consumers will not only engage they’ll also likely share the GET with others and become evangelists for the brand.

Design The GET For The Lowest Common Denominator
There’s nothing more frustrating to an interested consumer than a GET that they can’t get. Tailor GETs to the broadest possible audience by making SMS, available on over 98% of the world’s phones, a standard initial response. While mobile delivery of video content is clearly the future it is not yet accessible to all users on all networks on all phones, so resist the temptation to offer video as the only GET option.

Offer Multiple Engagement Options In The GET
Targeting the GET to the lowest common denominator does not mean offering boring text-only content. For example The Weinstein Company’s recent full length feature film release of Morgan Spurlock’s “Where in the World is Osama Bin Linden?” asked consumers to snap a picture of the movie poster at the theater, in local newspaper print ads or from one of the thousands of flyers distributed in five major cities. Consumers then received multiple GET options including a simple short text synopsis of the movie with links to view the theater preview of the release, links to Yahoo movie reviews, and geo-specific content for local movie theater times with the option to purchase tickets via Fandango. In addition, every consumer who participated in the campaign was instantly entered into a sweepstakes in the local market. Over 40% of consumers who snapped a picture of the movie poster drilled multiple layers down to seek out more information about the content and the movie -- far better than the average .02% click through rates achieved by online banner ads.

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.

SnapTell And Martha Stewart -- It's A Good Thing!

SnapTell is proud to announce that the Winter issue of Martha Stewart Weddings will be the first women's magazine to feature interactive advertisements throughout the publication, using SnapTell's Snap.Send.Get mobile marketing platform.

The issue will be available on newsstands December 29, 2008. Readers will be able to Snap a picture using their camera phones of any mobilized advertisement, Send the picture to SnapTell via MMS, and instantly Get content from the selected advertiser. Content offerings can include coupons, video or photos, website links or product information.

Martha Stewart Weddings is the top selling bridal magazine on newsstands, providing brides with help and inspiration in selecting the perfect dress, planning the perfect wedding and honeymoon and celebrating their new lives, all with impeccable style and creativity.

SnapTell's Snap.Send.Get works with virtually all camera phones, does not require the consumer to download any special software and is 100% opt-in. Advertisers can take advantage of the comprehensive reporting features to track the success of their campaigns and tailor their ads to meet consumer interests.

"We are committed to delivering multiple ways for our advertisers to build a relationship with our affluent brides," said Amy Wilkins, SVP, Publisher, Martha Stewart Weddings. "SnapTell's ease of use and simplicity will allow all of our brides to take advantage of this opportunity."

"Our new technology will allow Martha Stewart Weddings to provide their advertisers a stronger ability to interact with their highly sought after reader. To have a publication such as Martha Stewart Weddings using our technology is a real privilege," said Gautam Bhargava, CEO and founder of SnapTell."The mobile industry is poised for growth and SnapTell's Snap.Send.Get solution is allowing publications of all sizes and industries to really engage their readers and drive brand recognition for the advertisers."

For more information on SnapTell's end-to-end image recognition-based mobile marketing solution please visit our website or email us.

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.

GQ+Snap.Send.Get

SnapTell is in stylish company this month, GQ magazine is using our Snap. Send. Get mobile marketing platform to offer readers a free sample of Gillette® Clinical Strength Antiperspirant.

Readers can snap a picture of the Gillette® Clinical Strength Antiperspirant ad on page 303 of GQ's September 2008 issue with their camera phones, then send the picture to 707070* from their mobile phones to receive a sample of this clinically proven antiperspirant. If you don't happen to have a copy of the magazine handy, check out GQ's Connect site.

SnapTell’s Snap.Send.Get mobilizes existing marketing collateral, turning 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 [email protected].

Worth More Than A Thousand Words

IPG's Interpublic Media Lab focuses on analyzing (and, as they say, "rigorously testing") emerging technology and discovering the ways it can best be leveraged by brands. In a post on the Lab's blog about Men’s Health magazine's recent use of SnapTell's Snap.Send.Get mobile marketing platform, Michael Ball wrote:

In Japan, using your cameraphone to engage with advertising is old hat. They have been placing quick response codes (QR) in their out-of-home and print pieces for a few years now–which are basically barcode-looking things that can hold a ton of information.

But the U.S. is now in a position to potentially leapfrog this technology altogether, and go straight to snapping a shot of the very thing you want to know more about.

Michael Ball went on to raise some interesting points:

Almost two-thirds of all U.S. mobile subscribers have cameraphones–and the mélange of dog and child wallpapers show we certainly love using them–so the reach and the behavior are there. What this means for your print, out-of-home, radio, and even broadcast campaigns, then, is that it’s time to start thinking about how you can layer in mobile as an engagement tool.

Nobody’s saying you abandon your URL call-to-action. But if a potential customer is sitting in a doctor’s office with a magazine, odds are they’re going to forget your ad the second they get called in for that tetanus shot. But if there’s a mechanism to immediately opt-in via mobile, especially in a fun and engaging way, then you’ve captured a qualified lead–while they’re out in the world.

That’s worth more than a thousand words.

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.