Despite China having the largest mobile phone using population in the world with over 460 million handsets it seems that its not taking full advantage of mobile advertising just yet.
China Mobile alone has over 300 million subscribers and yet the mobile advertising market last year was valued at just US $17 million.
Interestingly the Chinese have come up with an amazing new type of advert to try to make the most of mobile users. The new format allows physical objects to be turned into hyperlinks. A user clicks on the link, which can be a billboard or even a leaflet on a coffee table, by taking a picture with the phones camera. The phone then reads a barcode from the advert and opens up a corresponding web page.
This brings up a huge number of possible applications, the first one I thought of was in real estate. A user could take a picture of a barcode on the “For Sale” sign and be taken to the web page about that particular house.
A Business Week article reports:
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.”
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.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
This has been in use for years in Japan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code