Mobile will save print, not kill it

With the rise of digital advertising, advertising budgets have shifted from traditional media such as print and broadcast mediums to digital ones.With the loss of advertising revenue, many traditional media publications have shifted their focus to digital channels, leading many pundits to proclaim the death of print media. Technologies such as augmented reality and visual search help marketers take advantage of the device which most consumers already carry around with them: the smartphone.By next year, mobile technology will influence one in every four product sales. However, mobile marketing is currently confined to the digital realm, even though the mobile device is now inherently a part of how we interact with the real world. This needs to change.Technologies such as augmented reality recognises this by letting people “see” the physical world differently using digital technology. Let’s say you want to buy a watch online, but aren’t sure how it will look on your wrist. Instead of just taking a gamble, you print off a paper wristband, strap it onto the wrist, and scan it using the in-app camera on your smartphone – and voila, on the mobile screen you see the watch perfectly placed onto your wrist. You’re able to meet a customer’s need – for validation – on-device, in a way that was once only possible through an in-store visit.Visual search, on the other hand, allows advertisers to connect print and digital worlds. By snapping a picture of an item in a physical advertisement, consumers can instantly explore the item in more detail before being presented with the choice to buy that item with one click of the phone, Uber-style.We see the process of being inspired by a product, researching and buying it reducing from a trip to the mall to a 60 second process on the smartphone. This is what we call the three-steps to buy; point-snap-pay.Searching and shopping are increasingly conducted on mobile devices, where interactions through touch and sight are increasingly preferred to text-based search. Visual search and augmented reality apps simplifies the process of finding what you want in an intuitive way, without requiring readers and consumers to learn complex new behaviours or website URLs.  The more seamless the link between searching and buying, the greater a marketer’s ROI will be. This is especially so in Asia, where the smartphone is often the only source of digital content.In addition, marketers and publishers alike have traditionally struggled when tracking return on investment from print advertisements, as there is no fully accurate methods of determining how much revenue came from such advertising campaigns. However, by overlaying a digital layer of content on top of these print advertisements, marketers are now able to track consumer engagement levels in ways that only digital can, such as click-through rates and/or the sales generated from each advertisement.This allows them to justify marketing budgets much more easily to internal stakeholders, as well as experimenting to see what types of advertisements work best for their brands.  Magazine pages, billboards and other marketing collaterals are now effectively open as direct sales channels.Augmented reality and visual search connect print to digital campaigns, creating a synergistic effect that brings out the best of both mediums – it’s no longer a case of one or the other. Off-line marcomms can be ‘on-lined’ very simply using a set of easy-to-use, desktop-based tools that are suitable for even the most tech-reticent marketers, whilst the more sophisticated applications can be deployed by more experienced in-house or agency teams using Software Development Kits (SDK).Marketers and publishers now have much more flexibility in how to deploy these approaches. This gives publishers a much-needed USP, as they can distinguish themselves from other off-line print publications and can upsell these capabilities to their advertisers.The writer is Niamh Byrne, chief operating officer of iQNECT.