Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
Mobile 2D barcodes are rapidly becoming a mainstay of major brand marketing campaigns worldwide. But, if you’re new to the space, the choices facing you on which kind of barcode to use and how best to use them, can be confusing. It is not just a matter of choosing one type of barcode, such as QR, DataMatrix, UPC and so on, it is about how to use and deploy them in a manner which will help to ensure overall campaign success – not only for the consumer but the brand owner as well. Ultimately, this will come down to a choice between leveraging free or fee based barcode services. This article briefly outlines the options for mobile barcode implementations, including both free and fee-based.
Free service snapshot
“Free” or “direct” mobile barcodes which simply contain the URL address of a webpage encoded into the barcode, are available from many online services. One can simply visit one of these websites, type in a URL address where they would like the code to direct to, and generate a mobile barcode free of charge or for a very limited fee. However, whilst these free code services are suitable for experimentation, trials or limited commercial use when few scans are anticipated, they do have significant limitations. For example:
–Analytics associated with direct barcodes are very limited. Website analytic tools often are not able to distinguish between mobile and non-mobile “hits” or gather valuable metadata associated with mobile “scans,” such as location based information, opt-in demographics and usage metrics.
–As the URL is also embedded in the QR code in direct or free implementations, the QR code size may also be physically larger in direct implementations. For a brand struggling with limited real estate in advertisements or on package, this becomes an issue.
–If one wishes to generate and manage a large number of barcodes, creating and printing these free barcodes can be a labor-intensive process and therefore more expensive in terms of man hours utilized.
–More importantly, using static URLs for barcodes requires statistics to be run on each individual URL through Web analytics. If the number of codes is more than a few, the management of the data quickly becomes unwieldy.
–Since these free mobile barcodes simply contain URLs, any time you want to change the URL, barcodes and collateral must either be reprinted or the content to which the code directs must be manually updated.
–There is no easy way to differentiate the experience delivered to the consumer based on critical context such as their device capabilities, demographics, location and date/time. Media-rich campaigns designed for a direct URL approach will work well for only a small segment of the consumers that are trying to access the campaign due to device or bandwidth limitations specific to the user, hindering overall uptake and ultimately the success of the campaign.
With free barcodes, the inability to easily manage the content, and to easily collect and measure user response undermines the advantages mobile barcode campaigns provide.
So why pay?
Providing a brand with more control to configure and customize campaigns that need to be scalable and measurable is one of the key benefits of a fee-based approach. In a fee-based scenario a brand or advertising agency works with a barcode management provider to create, resolve and manage the mobile barcodes. This same mobile barcode provider also collects and measures key consumer response statistics that helps a brand to understand total value and return for their initiative and investment – something a free campaign cannot do.
The key advantages of fee-based, or indirect, solutions are:
–Mobile barcodes provided by mobile barcode management providers are easy to generate, manage and measure using a service provider’s application interface.
–Clients are able to leverage the expertise of their vendor to gain insight into their case studies, expertise and best practices to ensure the success of their campaigns.
–Indirect or partial indirect mobile barcodes contain “indexes,” allowing linked content to be managed or re-directed as necessary, thus the mobile code remains manageable and flexible once printed in marketing initiatives.
–Depending upon the approach used (e.g. “indirect” vs. “partial indirect”) the mobile code service can provide detailed metadata analytics including time, date and location of any scan, as well as valuable user metadata, including gender and age, allowing brands to better understand who is engaging with them.
–Clients are able to generate batch barcodes to support campaigns requiring a large number of barcodes. Analytics are then available on the basis of campaigns, or other sort criteria, not available in direct barcodes.
–A partial indirect implementation can be read by any universal mobile code reader, extending the reach for the initiative.
–Considering the context of the user, such as location, date, time and device particulars is imperative in determining the optimal content and format that should be delivered. Rules and business logic can be quickly and easily defined on an indirect platform to determine the best way to route/handle a scan based on device capabilities of the target device and the context. The appropriate content can be displayed based on these particulars, therefore resulting in a campaign that works on the largest variety of devices and is much more personalized.
The key disadvantages are:
–Mobile code service providers charge a fee for their services. However, this is more than offset by the value that the vendor provides.
–With an indirect approach, a proprietary reader client needs to be installed on the phone in order to properly read the barcode.
While in the short-term it may seem that free services are attractive due to lack of initial investment, they do have important limitations and will impact the ongoing success and traceability of a campaign. Fee-based services provide benefits including long term campaign control and flexibility, greater consumer performance and the provision of usage data which more than offset the expense and are ultimately, a great example of ‘you get what you pay for.”
Laura Marriott has been CEO and Board Chairperson (acting) since October 2010. Prior to this she served as NeoMedia’s Chief Marketing Officer and has been an active member of the NeoMedia Board of Directors since January 2009. Before joining NeoMedia, Marriott ran her own mobile consultancy helping companies engage the mobile channel in their day to day business. Marriott has also served as President of the Mobile Marketing Association (“MMA”) from 2005 – 2009 and, earlier, as Director of Marketing for Intrado Inc.
