The Case for QR in Europe

June 25th, 2010

Quick Response (QR) codes have existed for 16 years now. These two-dimensional scancodes were originally designed for convenience purposes in manufacturing and logistics, but were adopted pretty quickly by advertisers. The big advantage over regular barcodes is that they can be scanned with low-resolution lenses, and they pack more information on a smaller space. Using the proper application, a QR code can be scanned with your mobile phone and link you to… whatever mobile. Be it a mobile website, video, ringtone or wallpaper: people do not want to start typing a URL to access these things on their mobile phone. But when you just have to scan a QR code, you can easily be persuaded to visit or download mobile content.

And that is huge: for the first time, real world objects can link to the internet in a direct and effortless way.

This means that a traditional magazine or billboard advertisement can be enhanced and expanded with mobile media. And that, in turn, means: more return on the advertiser’s investment. In Japan, always a few years ahead of the game, 2D-scanning is widely adopted and the streets, products and magazines are covered in QR codes.

Is advertising the only opportunity for QR? No. This guy managed to list 101 useful applications for QR. Some are a little far-fetched, but hey, he reached 101 didn’t he?

And why is QR only mainstreaming in Japan? Why isn’t it part of our daily media consumption? First of all, most Japanese have a 3G subscription (75.3% of total population, Netsize Guide 2010, stats from 3Q2009). In Europe, 3G subscription rate (24.1% of totap population, Qualcomm 2010, stats from 4Q2009) is increasing, but we’re not quite there yet. Today however, we’re more than convinced: QR is coming. It’s coming to our breakfast cereals, to our newspapers, our business cards, t-shirts and to our billboards.

The reason that we are so confident to post this article today, is because of 3 reasons:

1/

The game makers are ready. Lately, we have seen QR being pushed by some of the major players. Google recently shipped a unique QR code to the 100.000 most searched stores in the US. Through the QR codes, people can easily access the Google profile of the store, including reviews and practical information. Facebook has also been experimenting with QR. Rumour is that users will soon be able to generate a status QR code, that reveals their most recent status update.

2/

Advertisers are ready. Mobile has become a clear new focus for advertisers and brands. The enormous growth of the mobile market has made them more than curious. At the same time, the dust has settled, and we can now safely say that mobile is not there to replace certain traditional media. Print media will always exist, television will always exist, billboards will always exist. No matter how big mobile becomes. And that’s exactly the opportunity for QR: it bridges traditional media with mobile.

3/

People are ready. In the next few years, smartphone penetration will increase dramatically. With that, the threshold for new mobile technology adoption is getting lower and lower. Already, we see people adopting some of the most magical features of smartphones at an amazing pace. Location based services were non-existent just a few years ago, but now we grab our iPhone or Android almost instinctively when we’re looking for something nearby.

Try QR yourself! Visit qr.inthepocket.mobi and create your own scan code. (Or click here, if you’re reading this on a mobile device)

If you want to use a QR code professionally in a campaign, you will need tracking of the number of scans and mobile content to link the code to. In The Pocket is working on a platform to create, manage and track QR campaign. Feel free to contact us.

To finish with a recent QR case that caught our attention: normally we would avoid using QR codes on curvy surfaces because they are harder to scan. Sometimes however, we are glad to make an exception…

Holland Hup

 

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Posted in Advertising, Technology | 2 Comments »

I don’t own a cell phone. I just hang around everyone I know, all the time. ~Mitch Hedberg

May 21st, 2010

Since a few years mobile location based services have been an extremely promising branch of the mobile ecosystem. The real boom of location-aware applications is, however, very recent. Location based services are taking the app-market by storm.

Whereas the traditional computer is built to receive input from the keyboard and the mouse, the smartphone is designed to work with input from touch, movement sensing, audio, video and location. It seems like only scent was left out, and even that might change. In short: your smartphone knows a lot about you. This means that apps can interact with you within the context that you are at a certain moment. And that means: Relevance, with a capital “R”, the essence of mobile. Location awareness is huge in this regard.

“Check-In apps” such as Gowalla and Foursquare, which basically let users share their whereabouts, are generating intense activity in cities all over the world. SimpleGeo, a startup that helps developers add location-based features to their apps has now raised a whopping $8.14 million to allow for speedy expansion. They made a cute video showing the location based action in Austin, Texas during SXSW:

How cool is that?

And did somebody say Facebook? Of the 400 million Facebook users, 100 million regularly check their account via mobile. And yes, Facebook is implementing location-sharing throughout its platform. Needless to say, this will make location based mainstream, whereas your typical Brightkite or Gowalla user today is still an “early adopter”. If one mobile trend will dominate in 2010, rest assured: it will be location awareness.

In a more modest note: In The Pocket is also working on location based technology. In the past few months we have been collaborating with the University of Ghent to develop a generic app that can be used for large events. Very quickly, an event organizer can customize our generic app to suit the needs and to match the style of his/her own event. The app shows location-relevant information about the event along with other useful features. The app serves as a context-interactive event guide with social sharing tools. We’re still in development, but hope to demonstrate the app sometime soon.

 

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Hello World!

May 5th, 2010

A couple of months ago, in a bar in Ghent, three guys started talking about “mobile”. The fastest growing mass medium ever, the new face of the internet and the only medium that people always carry with them. In their pockets.

The mobile ecosystem was our passion and it was about to become our profession. In The Pocket is the first Belgian agency to limit its focus to the mobile internet and to offer the full scope of services within that realm. We do not develop websites for the fixed web. We do, however, develop mobile websites. And applications. And landing pages, creatives, mobile payment systems, location based services, augmented reality apps: you name it, we make it.

So we develop. But if that would be it, we would not be a full-service agency. In The Pocket also offers mobile marketing and mobile advertising solutions. What good is a website or an app if nobody knows about it, right? We have the proper inhouse knowledge to find your target audience and to get the message accross. Would you like some tracking and reporting to go with that? No problem.

From the early start, we were very happy to see that many of the most talented young mobile professionals in Belgium were enthousiastic about working with In The Pocket. Today we are a great team of mobile specialists. We like to refer to ourselves as “mobile craftsmen”, because mobile is really a craft: unlike the regular web, there are platforms and devices to be taken into the equation, regional differences, mobile user psychology and much more. The personal and direct power of mobile media comes with a price: fragmentation. But don’t be discouraged, the fragmentation can be overcome and the upside is enormous.

Today, Europeans are spending more time on the mobile web, than they are reading newspapers or magazines. In two years time (and that’s the conservative estimate), more smartphones will be connected to the internet than computers. We know that, right now, every brand, company and organization is thinking: how should we get on that train?

That “how” is our business. The “when” is yours. We’d love to hear from you!

Pieterjan Bouten, Louis Jonckheere, Jeroen Lemaire

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