Days after we reported on American students at Case Western University being unimpressed by mobile barcodes, news surfaces from the two-year old Hong Kong company MyClick, an image recognition mobile marketing firm as it calls itself, that it has signed a deal with Pepsi to create an advertising campaign for it in China, aimed at 12-24 year olds.
MyClick
Not convinced users are happy to download apps – there has to be a very strong draw to make people install an app and then run it every time they see this kind of content, and on many handsets the apps just aren't quickly available for spontaneous use (sadly).
Perhaps people in China are more easily compelled to download content for their phones, I'd certainly be interested to read more details about how the trials were conducted and assessed before making any judgements about them…
I would still say that the reader must be tightly integrated with the normal camera experience to really work, as it is in Japan. Otherwise, it just won't hit a tipping point.
Thank you for both this and the previous article on the Case Western University mobile bar code experiment. There is a lot of potential in this type of technology if the business model is done correctly — MyClick may have figured it out. The trial at Case Western definitely didn't strike the right balance between users and bar-code available content at the right prices. No one is going want to pay for advertising.