How can Blippar technology benefit manufacturers in the food and beverage industry?
Ambarish Mitra: Recognise a product in its entirety or a part of its label. It’s never been done before, that’s the fascinating. The product is becoming the source of marketing itself, rather than companies spending lots of money in above-the-line marketing.
You can watch a TV ad straight from the product. Dream tool for any food and beverage marketer.
Do consumers need to be knowledgable in terms of technology in order to fully utilise its use? For example, How will consumers be made aware of how to download the app? Will the new packaging require a certain amount of POS to explain to consumers what they have to do?
Ambarish Mitra: Today’s generation is very mobile – pointing a camera for photography is a very common behaviour, we are just an extension of that behaviour.
10-15% space on the Blippar call to action on the product packaging. As an example, Blippar worked on a product with £2m on-shelf, with a conversion rate between 1.5-2%.
Conversation rates are still very attractive. No medium promises a 100% conversion rate, but in terms of technology benchmarks, all forms of conversions over 1% is definitely attractive.
People do interact with point of sale marketing. POS offers something extra beyond basic purchase and Blippar relies heavily on POS interaction.
How does it differ from current, established systems such as QR codes?
Ambarish Mitra: QR codes was a bridge in technology. Had image recognition existed five years ago, QR codes would never have existed.
QR codes bridge between the physical and a web page, [while] Blippar bridges between the physical and interactive content. QR codes were trying to solve a problem which Blippar completely solves and offers 90% more features.
As a core behaviour, we are similar, but with QR codes you had to aim at a specific code somewhere in the corner. With Blippar, you point it at an image and the whole thing comes alive. QR codes bridge between the physical page and a web page, Blippar bridges between the physical page and multiple interactive content from video content to 3D gaming to opinion polls.
What can the consumer actually expect to get when they scan the code?
Ambarish Mitra: It can be anything from video content, to 3D gaming, to opinion polls micro-competitions, dynamic content based on location etc. It’s a marketer’s dream. The platform is very dynamic. Creative teams can think of creative ways to use this technology.
Are they used for offers or just additional content?
Ambarish Mitra: Both.
What age group/demographic is the content being directed at, or is this directed by the particular product it is placed on?
Ambarish Mitra: The demographic is quite wide, all the way from teenagers to people in their forties, drinks are quite demographically agnostic. It’s more seasonal rather than demographic behaviour at play here. More important is ‘app behaviour’.
Apps started as a younger people’s activity, but now it’s almost a necessity of life, so smartphones and people using apps are crossing those demographic barriers.
The core age group is still between 16-40, but we often see aberrations depending on the core market of the respective product/brand.
Will certain consumers miss out on its benefits if they don’t own smartphones?
Ambarish Mitra: Yes, definitely. I believe smartphones are a necessity. Some apps like Google Maps are an absolute necessity and I wonder how some people can function without them.
The world is obsessed with photography and videography, and we are increasingly becoming a very interlinked and interactive world. We believe in a future that people would be able to ‘talk’ to products, and have those products ‘talk’ back to them. Things are going to be a lot more dynamic and connected, to be sustainable information-wise in a very connected world. Having a smartphone is very important.
I think micro-factors would push late adopters into getting smartphones. I think we’ll get to a point where all phones are smartphones. You wouldn’t be able to buy a feature phone two years down the line.
Are there any materials that it can’t be used on?
Ambarish Mitra: As of today, it can’t work on plain surfaces, like solid black or white, as it doesn’t know what it’s looking at. It needs patterns, it needs differentiation, it needs contrast to recognise what it sees.
It could be argued that people view QR codes as a bit of a gimmick when related to products, and therefore they aren’t used as much as was first thought when they were initially launched. How do you plan to avoid that happening with your new technology?
Ambarish Mitra: Because of the kind of content we are already creating. It’s quite right that people used to look at QR codes as a gimmick because marketers used it to simply divert people to a webpage, and it would have been more cost effective to simply put a url at the bottom instead of a QR code.
In terms of managing user expectations, QR codes have been poor. With Blippar, actually the host client has so many more attractive options to make that content come alive in a more engaging way.
Another thing to remember is if the QR code gets smudged by even one pixel, the code won’t work. Even a halftone label will work with Blippar. Blippar works with even partial recognition of a package, so user adoption with Blippar has been quite consistent and quite good simply because the technology works, and that was one of the biggest problems with QR codes.
It’s quite common, especially in print press, for smudges to occur, rendering the code unreadable.
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