China: Cracking the Mobile Ad Biz
From Business Week: China: Cracking the Mobile Ad Biz Advertising to the world's largest mobile phone user-base should be a marketer's dream. Yet China's mobile advertising market was valued at just US$17 million last year, well below the US$40 billion spent on ads in total.
A new kind of mobile advertising technology, however, could be the key that unlocks the country's 461 million mobile phone screens to advertisers.
The technology uses two-dimensional barcodes, a more evolved cousin of the humble Universal Product Code found on groceries, to create an advertising channel with an aura of science-fiction.
Two-dimensional barcodes can be used to bridge the online and offline worlds, turning, say, a coffee table into a physical hyperlink, and your mobile phone into a giant mouse pointer. You "click" the barcode on the coffee table by taking a picture of it with the camera on your phone, and then are automatically taken online.
When used properly, it can help advertisers build detailed databases and customer profiles. Location, content viewed, mobile phone used - it can all be traced.
"Advertisers will know where someone was when they clicked the ad and guess what they were doing at that moment," said Sage Brennan of research firm JLM Pacific Epoch. "If [barcode-reading software] is in every handset around the country, the incentive to insert a tiny code [in advertisements] is huge."
SHORT ON SOPHISTICATION
China's mobile advertising market is starved of such innovative delivery methods. The market is currently dominated by SMS advertising, which relies on the cheapness of untargetted text messages.
SMS advertising is a "push" technology, leaving consumers at the mercy of advertisers. But with barcodes, the consumer chooses whether or not to click. In Japan and Korea, 2-D barcodes are already used for everything from bus schedules to stock market updates.
For a three-month period that ended in February, Chinese barcode pioneer Gmedia provided Starbucks with barcodes to display on tabletops in the chain's 50 outlets in Beijing. When a user clicked on one, they were linked to a website that allowed them to redeem a free coffee.
Another company trying to cash in on physical hyperlinking is Hong Kong-based MyClick. Although it uses a patented photo recognition technology, not barcodes, the endresult is virtually identical. Any visual medium - a magazine page, billboard or television commercial - can carry an image framed by a special border. The user simply snaps a photo of the framed image. click here for the rest of the article.
Technorati Tags: advertiser, advertising, cell, china , mobile, phone, two dimensional