• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, January 30, 2006

One word, just one word: CueCat.

You interactive marketers with any memory left of the pre-bubble years are already cringing at the mention of this famously flawed attempt to marry print and interactive worlds with a hand scanner. The CueCat, shaped like a stylized prone feline, but looking more like a personal vibrator, read codes from magazine pages to trigger specific marketing and editorial Web pages when the Cat was connected to a PC. We won't relive that nightmare (one mag sent out 800,000 devices free to subscribers), but suffice to say that the obvious unwieldiness of this scheme doomed it from the start.

And yet, at the heart of the CueCat is a compelling notion of connecting physical and interactive realms, a marketing wet dream that cell phones finally make possible, if not imminent. Imagine customers taking a phone-cam shot of your movie poster, hair care product, magazine ad--whatever--and, in return, immediately receiving coupons, product details, comparative pricing information, or a recorded message from a film star. The physical world, any object, becomes a container of content, an instance where laser-targeted information shoots to the consumer precisely when and where she needs it. All goods become clickable interactive objects.

Of course the technology for this is advancing, and startup elves are banging out in-market demos already. The most evolved executions I have seen involve the "visual search" company Mobot (www.mobot.com), which has been working with ElleGirl Magazine since the summer. Mobot's is a fairly clean approach that requires no client software on the phone or disfiguring visual code in the ad itself. Consumers take a snap of an ad or a CD cover and e-mail it to the Mobot visual database of these images, which recognizes the image and enters the user in a contest. Elle Girl says the campaign has been very successful with its teen readership, with more than two dozen ad clients signing up quickly. This approach could just as easily be used to send users more content, WAP or click-to-call links, etc.

According to research on the Elle Girl September issue, purchase intent among those who used the phone-cam on these ads increased 14 percent, and sometimes up to 28 percent. Aided recall for the 25 advertisers involved was up 15 percent, sometime up to 33 percent. Perhaps the best news of all is that a whopping 96 percent of contest participants said they were veryextremely likely to engage with similar promotions. Now, who said mobile marketing is intrusive?

An alternative approach, NextCode (www.nextcodecorp.com), uses the more classic visual coding, a unique sequence of printed squares that a phone cam can read for triggering a direct call, a WAP link, content downloads, etc. You can even put these on your business cards. NextCode does require client software downloaded or embedded on the handset, but it offers in return a broader range of immediate interactive paybacks. You can go to their site and make your own printable codes to use as personal shortcuts for your phone.

We are a long way off from widespread use of these systems, and for all of the usual pain-in-the-ass reasons that mobile is such a, well, pain-in-the-ass medium. First, there is the technology. Mobot doesn't require new software but it does require education. In order for the contest entries to work, users must first register at the Web site and then learn how to e-mail an image. It is also a multi-step process that is cooler, but only a little more efficient, than typing in a short code. NextCode is only compatible now with certain Nokia phones, and it is the kind of solution that is versatile but really requires ubiquity. Both of these systems become consumer-friendly when the processes are no more difficult than clicking a Web link, but that would require cross-carrier standards and user education. Ubiquity? User education? Cross-carrier cooperation on standards? Yeah, I'm laughing, too.

Nevertheless, the promise of activating the physical world, of letting content pour out of encounters with products and promotions, is just too great even for the mobile carriers to ignore. At some point, they will have to start making this idea work for everyone