In a first, NFC technology is used in a poster marketing campaign
Move over QR codes, NFC has arrived. Gone (soon) are the days when you need to scan a code at all – too much effort involved in that! Now NFC (near field communication) technology is starting to appear more on the scene, most recently with Google’s announcement to introduce an NFC payment system. Now, apparently for the first time, NFC is being used in a public marketing campaign to promote the film ‘X-Men First Class’. On special posters being displayed in London, passersby that have NFC-enabled phones can simply tap their phone to the poster to reveal an exclusive trailer and a link to the Facebook Page with a prompt to Like it. This is one of the most mainstream marketing campaigns we’ve seen using NFC and shows that it could be about to become the next QR code, as advertisers strive to find increasingly innovative ways to keep users entertained and get more advertising bang for their buck. The X-Men campaign is a great example of this.
According to the press release for this campaign, the software developers (Proxama) have developed the chip to allow advanced tracking of the success of the campaign, allowing the promoter access to reports to see how people are engaging with the content. This is a great example of an integrated marketing campaign as it successfully offers the user something completely additional that relates to the film itself – value added content for the true fans and bringing this nicely back online with a link to Like the Page on Facebook. They’ve successfully got their users from the point of the physical poster, to long-term engagement online through the Facebook Like button.
The end of QR codes in the real world?
This is of course a long way off, as the amount of people that currently have NFC enabled phones pails in comparison to the amount of users with a smartphone that can carry a QR code reader. But as NFC technology becomes more pervasive, it’s hard to see QR codes surviving, though there are minimal cost in adding an NFC chip to promotional material, that advertisers will have to consider. While QR codes will still be prominent in digital displays, the potential for NFC marketing campaigns is huge, as it moves the user even closer from the offline to the online, successfully bridging the divide.
It might be early days for the use of NFC in a campaign like this, which is due to user education as much as it is to availability of the technology. What it shows however is a complete convergence of traditional and digital media in a way that we’ve never quite seen before. Our media are becoming frequently less separate entities and are instead becoming one complete channel at which the user is captured, entertained and maintained. The difference now though of course is that the user might end up in a completely different place to where they started, seemingly with little or no effort on their part. The mobile becomes the key player here, as brands attempt to capture people ambiently and keep them engaged digitally.
