At last night’s Advertising Club of NY Meetup at Google’s Chelsea offices, Google execs talked about how they’ve been busy reengineering the offline ad-buying process and adding web-like metrics and measurement to radio, TV and print advertising. There was talk of environmental radio ad triggers, so that if pollen levels reached a certain point in a region you could have allergy medication radio ads deployed (synergy!). The vision was for a Google Analytics dashboard utopia combining online and offline activity reporting for Maximum Ad Impact Awareness. Center Networks has video of the whole evening.
The big plan for print ads: barcodes. Mobile phone-friendly barcodes that you scan with your phone’s camera to be taken to a web page in your phone’s browser—a concept eerily similar to that of the late-bubble CueCat scanners that failed spectacularly eight years ago.
But apparently barcodes have come a long way since then. There are semacodes, which I first learned about via Lauren’s blogging of Eliott Malkin’s eRuv project a few years ago (information about eruvin and the history of Lower Manhattan is a lot more likely to get me to point my phone at a barcode than an ad, but maybe that’s just me). There are QR codes, Data Matrix codes, ShotCodes and the quest to hardlink the physical world continues unabated.
Will it be catching on around here soon? No. QR codes are big in Japan, but so are mobile phone novels. You need special software to make these things work and the big American mobile carriers are not exactly on board. Google’s Great Hope: the Android mobile platform project.
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Android will clearly make its presence felt in the 2D barcode world. I attended a conference called BarCamp NYC2 where Android’s barcode reader was discussed, and it seems that Android will read all the open source codes on the market. Will Android will read any proprietary codes? In the US, open source codes seem more akin to a dream than reality. Proprietary codes, however obnoxious the concept may seem will be the future. The aspect of monetization is too huge to pass up, and there are some privacy advantages to proprietary codes. We’re waiting on one big PR break or one big advertiser to actually make this new technology somewhat known. We’ll see what happens.
All day I’ve been scoffing in my head, “What are they thinking? Like, ‘Hey, point your phone here to get more advertising,’ yeah RIGHT! Even if the technology was ubiquitous I would never do that!”
But then I thought, if there are more (ok, a LOT more) artistic/informational projects like eRuv, it actually might become a familiar enough means of obtaining information that people will consider using it for commerce that they’re actually interested in.
So basically geeky artists and intellectuals have to pave the way for advertisers. Kind of like how it happened with the WWWs.