1st NFC smart poster social media marketing campaign for US

Proxama deploys the first US NFC smart poster campaign for VH-1′s Basketball Wives

The US gets its first NFC smart poster campaign today, thanks to the folks over at Proxama. We have discovered a simple equation that seems to define NFC smart poster marketing so far: fun + interactive x marketing / contactless = Proxama. The company seems to be involved whenever there is an interesting marketing campaign in the offing and today is no exception, as the company announces its involvement in another NFC smart poster campaign for VH-1′s new show Basketball Wives. This isn’t the first NFC smart poster campaign that the UK outfit has been involved in. They were also the people behind the X-Men: First Class campaign in London, which saw 20 smart posters in and around London with NFC tags embedded that linked to the movie’s Facebook page.

Neil Garner, Founder and CEO of Proxama said, “I am delighted that Proxama has been chosen to be the NFC partner for this exciting project. It is very important that we are able to demonstrate to advertisers, businesses and consumers the potential that NFC offers which is why we are running this campaign in tandem with a leading handset manufacturer in Nokia and outdoor media specialists Hyperspace.”

NFC smart poster campaigns are in their infancy at the moment but show great promise as a medium to have physical marketing pieces that consumers can interact with. The nature of smart posters is frictionless and the medium allows for different calls to action to be embedded straight into objects such as cards, posters, window signage or anything else. Smart posters also allow for great analytics which are a very attractive concept for marketers. We have mentioned before that some of the NFC Rumors team are marketers, and what we are attracted to in smart posters is the opportunity to start engagement and conversations with consumers straight from an inanimate object that earns and provides the opportunity to allow permission based contact with end users in the future. Listing building hasn’t died, it’s simply evolved and you can expect to see a lot more utilization of this approach over the coming years. NFC smart posters are not limited to movie posters in malls, but will also appears on packaging for products you buy and use everyday. Thus far, most campaigns are about capturing details and sharing media and that is why we have seen social media used. However, in the future expect to see coupon offers as well as permission based list signups built straight into marketing pieces. The NFC smart poster medium is also expected to NFC smart poster promote and enable e-commerce sales of event tickets and even take-out menus as it matures. The possibilities of smart posters are mind boggling and appear to be only limited by imagination.

No NFC smart poster campaigns have hit the main stream as yet

The VH-1 NFC smart poster campaign is a trial, as was the X-Men campaign, distributed in a limited fashion to assess how effective the medium is. However, with the lack of people walking around with NFC phones at this time the take-up rate will be slim at best. That is set to change over the next few months as more and more NFC-enabled handsets comes to market and companies like Proxama will have tried and tested methods to build campaigns quickly and cost effectively for organizations who want to benefit from NFC smart posters.

“From the work we did delivering the marketing campaign for the X-Men movie with Nokia earlier this year, we know that NFC presents organisations with a great way of promoting their wares and nurturing closer relationships with customers that can incentivise a purchase or retail visits and enables them to track individual mobile phone users’ subsequent behaviour through our TagManager campaign management system. NFC offers advertisers greater opportunities to build ‘hyper-local’ promotional campaigns using media-rich, high quality content through a simple tap of the NFC smart poster phone . And because content is delivered immediately without lengthy downloads or cumbersome procedures it leads to a much more satisfying customer experience and keeps down costs,” said Garner.

The agencies who are embracing NFC marketing right now are garnering the skills needed to usher in the biggest opportunity in engaged marketing since social media and social networking. Savvy agencies will create viral expansion principles that are built straight into the fibre of campaigns that promote sharing and engagement. However, one conversation that hasn’t started hitting the mainstream as yet is what metrics will be important in defining a campaign’s success? Will it be total interactions? Conversions? Exposure? Or simply calls to actions used? Different campaigns will require different metrics and CRM’s will have to be adapted to allow for this new form of marketing as it takes hold and embrace the new metrics that will be tracked. Augme and their AdLife suite has already started to build these functionalities to track metrics, but until we see this kind of campaign with Sugar CRM support we cannot consider NFC smart posters mainstream. From a NFC smart poster marketing perspective, what complicates the tracking of NFC smart poster metrics is the fact that one single NFC smart poster can contain multiple NFC tags with a corresponding amount of actions and thus associated metrics. This unto itself represents more opportunity but the question of ROI on any particular campaign NFC smart poster becomes muddied as multiple metrics and goals are associated with an NFC smart poster campaigns. That is the single reason why the trials like Proxama’s VH-1 Basketball Wives, NFC smart poster campaigns are so critical and further more illustrates why agencies are clambering to gain experience in this new marketing opportunity.

Proxama didn’t go it alone in the VH-1 Basketball Wives NFC smart poster trial

Proxama is a long time partner of Nokia who together with Hyperspace (a part of the Posterscope out of home marketing agency), JCDecaux and Cemusa all partnered to make the VH-1 Basketball Wives NFC smart poster possible. Nokia supplied the phones, Hyperspace probably had the client and conceptualized the campaign and JCDecaux and Cemusa are the distribution specialists.

Martin Porter, VP Director,  Hyperspace said, “What is so exciting about this new technology is its simplicity, its low cost and the worldwide adoption taking place—all creating large-scale purposeful marketing opportunities that can be easily implemented across the US.  There are hundreds of thousands of commercially available poster sites that can be instantly enabled with the technology. The potential application of this technology is immense.”

Proxama would have supplied the NFC tags and programming for the NFC smart poster by using their own TagManager platform that also collects user location details.  NFC Marketing is just getting started and NFC smart posters have a big future for hyper-local and national marketing campaigns. Every time we find out about an NFC smart poster campaign of merit or a new Proxama project, we will be sure to let you know.