Nike puts together snowboarders, bar codes and MMS
Nike's action sports brand 6.0 is running a mobile bar code campaign at the Winter Dew Tour that ends at Northstar-At-Tahoe next weekend.
In addition to bar codes, the teen targeting campaign uses MMS messages. At every Tour event, there are bar codes on the posters that Nike hands out to people. When a person takes a picture of the bar code next to a photo of an athlete in the poster and sends it to a short code set up for the campaign, he receives a short video clip and other info featuring the athlete back to his phone. For example, if the person takes a picture of the barcode next to snowboarder Simon Dumont's photo and sends it to the short code, he gets a set of photos of Simon on the half pipe and in the backcountry back to his phone by MMS.
The 2D bar code system, provided by a company called Jagtag, doesn't require any additional software to be downloaded on the phone first. MMS technology provides device ID, which enables Jagtag to optimize video returns across carriers and handsets. That means that the service will know to send the material to the user's phone in the right format.
MMS - or Multimedia Messaging Service - first commercially launched in 2002 in Europe. The difference between SMS, which most mobile users are more familiar with, and MMS is very similar to the difference between plain text and HTML email: SMS is just for short text messages, whereas MMS can carry attachments: images, video clips, and sound.
With real, usable mobile Web slowly becoming a reality, MMS has become a bit of a forgotten addition to mobile messaging. In Europe and Asia it has been used in some marketing campaigns over the years, but in North America the examples have been few and far between.
In the Nike example, after getting the print poster, the user needs to start his phone's camera application, take a good, clear shot of the barcode, send it to the shortcode by MMS, and then wait for the MMS back from the service. It's not the shortest user flow, but it offers a more direct connection between the printed media and the user's phone than typing in a URL on the phone's browser.
According to Jagtag, current statistics show that
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Image credit: FlickrFlex's
Posted by: Andreea Hirica
Posted on: Contagious Ideas
