• by Tricia Despres , January 5, 2010

With over 75 percent of consumers now having picture messaging capabilities on their phones, visual recognition advertising has been a hot topic of late, enabling companies to launch a virtual conversation with their target consumer via traditional media. Through mobile activation, companies have found a way to not only deliver a wide range of brand content, but open an actual dialogue with the consumer.

"This sort of technology is an amazing opportunity for advertisers to expand their content beyond the parameters of traditional media," says Dan Cornell, director of digital strategy at Edelman. "It's a door opener to creating a real relationship."

Often, this relationship between advertiser and consumer starts rather simply with brand recognition, often involving the brand logo. Denver CO based SpyderLink recognized the importance of the logo and is now taking a brand first approach with technology much more accessible than your average 2D or QR mobile barcode.

SpyderLynk's SnapTag technology utilizes breaks in a proprietary code ring surrounding the brand logo. Encoding can be applied to any logo and once encoded, a logo becomes a SpyderLynk SnapTag, giving companies a way to track a multitude of different media placements.

"Our vision is that marketers will have an ability to make their logos interactive across their entire marketing mix, track the performance of each different logo placement and and tailor the offer to the media channel," remarks Jane McPherson, chief marketing officer of SpyderLynk. "There are other companies doing image recognition -- when a consumer sends in a picture of a logo the technology recognizes the logo and sends the consumer the corresponding response. But there is only one response that can be associated with the logo, limiting a marketer's ability to track the performance of different logo placements and the ability to tailor their offer to different media channels."

Colorado based SpyderLink has worked with advertisers such as Crayola, Ford Motor Company and Warner Brothers and plans to take the technology this year not only into magazines, but everywhere from casinos to bus shelters.