It was announced yesterday that the July/August edition of Men’s Health Magazine will feature interactive advertising with help from SnapTell’s image-recognition-based mobile marketing solutions. The issue features enabled or “live” ads for readers to receive real-time promotional information from advertisers.
Using SnapTell’s Snap.Send.Get(TM) mobile marketing technology, readers can simply snap a photo of any advertisement in the issue with their camera phone and send to SnapTell to receive an instant promotional message on their mobile device. The technology is compatible with all camera phones, does not require special software for downloading advertiser images and is an opt-in solution for the reader. We covered SnapTell in greater detail here.
The issue features over 100 advertisers that are all participating in the innovative mobile campaign. Companies such as AT&T, Anheuser-Busch, Honda, Louis Vuitton, Quaker Oats, The Coca-Cola Company, Procter & Gamble and Unilever USA are all utilizing the interactivity to communicate with readers. All advertisement images had to be uploaded to a main server at SnapTell, and when readers snap a photo of a particular advertisement and send back to SnapTell, the image is compared to the main database to search for a match. When it finds the matching image, it connects to the associated mobile content, and sends it back to the requesting reader. All of the recognition and communication is handled by SnapTell on their servers, which is why it requires no special mobile software or applications. This method offers a great deal of flexibility for marketers to provide instant brand messaging, sales incentives such as product samples and discounts, sweepstakes information, and links to websites, photos and videos.
I’ve always said that once mobile technologies such as QR Codes and image recognition become more prominent in the US, it would lead to vast deployments such as this. Men’s Health magazine provided a perfect testing ground for SnapTell to test it’s solutions. I’ll be on the lookout for information about the response the interactive advertising had with Men’s Health readers. If I had to guess, I’d say it will be a huge success!