Here’s another one for all you music lovers out there. My colleague Sayed proudly whipped out his Apple i-phone to introduce me to a music identification service known as Shazam. Shazam provides downloadable widgets to cell phones that allow you to search music album information on the go. Imagine yourself listening to a song while at a music store and liking it but not knowing the artist is. Now with Shazam all you need to do is record a clip and viola album information at your fingertips. Available for Apple i-phones, i-touch iPods, BlackBerry it is now even available for Ovi by Nokia.
The service is pretty impressive. All it takes is for the phone’s built in mike to record a part of the clip. The widget then connects to the internet and searches an online database for a match. This service is no new kid on the block having been launched back in 2002. Already Shazam has a social networking model built into it being connected to Facebook, allowing you to share songs with friends and an e-commerce angle that allows you to purchase songs online.
What could be interesting if advertisers could tie up certain advertising jingles with downloadable offers / advertisements? Imagine you are listening to the radio and an advertiser plays a jingle which he records to his phone. Or you are walking through a mall and the in store jingle has discount offers embedded in them for first five downloaders that hour. And that's just the tip of the Iceberg, envision musical treasure hunts across retail chains for starters, the possibilities are limitless.
Using a service like Shazam the phone sends the person’s phone number to a database as an interested user and provides the users with some downloadable content – jpeg image, discount coupon or whatever. For now Shazam is yet another exemplary example of bridging the gap between mobiles and internet.
Friday, August 7, 2009
Shazam - The Sound of Music to Marketers Ears
Friday, July 31, 2009
Beyond Basic Bar codes
A few years ago when I was in college, SMS marketing was the new thing on the block that was making a buzz. Now everyone uses SMS short codes – those numbers that you send a text message to, to get information or take part in a competition. Today, people even want SMS codes on websites, bridging the web and offline marketing activities. Yet one thing that is yet to be tapped in the Indian market space is the new developments in what I call next-gen bar codes. Whether QR codes or Semacodes, Indian marketers are yet to invest in these technologies.
What made me to start to think about these new age bar codes as the next marketing tech tool was an episode of CSI where a QR code is recovered at a crime scene. According to the story, the Quick Response - QR code or Semacode has an embedded link to a website, which is read by a scanner. I thought of little of this until I saw a colleague of mine trying to scan bar codes with his i-phone, which automatically searched for the cost of the products online.
Most cell phones come with built-in cameras these days. If a Semacode can be read from a photo by a cell phone application then marketers have an altogether new and fun way to promote products. In fact this is already quite popular in Japan, where Japanese cell phones read these codes using their camera. What this means in the Indian market space is that we could see ‘Collect the Semacode’ competitions for example, promoting FMCG products or providing information about offers.
Just having Semacodes linked to website landing pages will be a step forward in the right direction, what with more and more people hopping onto the mobile internet bandwagon. These smart bar codes can even be used in both print medium and hoardings. What makes them so ideal is that it reduces the pain of having to type in a URL.