Last week I was reading some interesting stuff about Google Print Ad barcodes. Google believe that "technology can revolutionize traditional print advertising and make it even more useful for readers".
Google's plans to make print advertising more measurable by essentially converging 'old school' print media with the internet. Thanks to modern mobile phone technology, this can be achieved by using a mobile phone camera to snap an image of a barcode (see image above and left as an example) on the print advertisement which will in turn trigger your internet capable mobile phone to visit a specific URL.
Finally those shitty little mobile phone cameras we all have can be put to use, rather than being a gimmick that is fun to play with for a couple of hours after the phone is broken out of it's wrapper ;-)
Given the fact that I hail from a yellow pages back ground (in my early direct marketing days), I hold a certain level of interest in the future of print advertising. The general consensus amongst genuine online marketers of New Zealand has been that print ads have just been too expensive, not completely in-effective, just too expensive.
This assessment is made when we compare the costs and return of the tactic with the cost of acquiring and converting a customer using tactics such as Google Adwords to drive traffic to a website that converts a customer into taking a specific action such as a transaction.
If this barcoding print ad technology reaches it's potential and is adopted on an international basis, marketers should be able to measure the ROI driven from a print advertisement in the same way that we measure ROI from a text based Google search ad at the moment.
Similar methodology can then be applied to the investments that are made in print advertising and what we should see is a new era where clients control the cost of print advertisements in the same way that they now control the costs of paid placement search advertisements like adwords.
Whilst the idea of this new era of print advertising seems quite mind blowing, the technology that Google propose to maker it happen is not. A quick search on this topic will lead you to CueCat. These guys seem to have been a little ahead of their time?
I am not surprised that it will take the immense power that really only Google has to force such a huge change in the way that print advertising is valued, measured and sold.
Digital convergence marches on........
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