What do Monday Night Football and Martha Stewart Weddings have in common? In a word: SnapTell.
The Winter issue of Martha Stewart Weddings will be the first women’s magazine to use SnapTell’s “live” advertisements throughout the publication. On stands Dec. 29, the issue will allow readers to snap a picture of any featured advertisement, send the picture to SnapTell and instantly get back content from an advertiser. It’s all part of SnapTell’s Snap.Send.Get solution.
It’s similar to what SnapTell is doing with other magazines. Every ad in the NFL fall preview issue of ESPN The Magazine was SnapTell-enabled, and the company saw a spike in usage leading up to and even after Monday Night Football earlier this week, according to SnapTell CEO and co-founder Gautam Bhargava.
Bhargava said the hope is more women’s magazines will join the fray. Other magazines running SnapTell-enabled ads are Men’s Health, Rolling Stone and GQ.
The SnapTell solution works with any cameraphone, and users are not required to install anything, he said. They simply take a picture, and SnapTell recognizes the image and sends back relevant information. In some cases, it’s a link to a ringtone; in other cases, it may be a coupon, video or product information. Unlike SMS, there’s no keyword to enter. SnapTell’s universal short code is 707070.
Other entities have tried to do similar marketing with cameraphones, but those were limited in scope. “The scale at which we’re doing it is unprecedented,” he said.
Print ads don’t need to be modified, but sometimes the ads will include a call to action. If it’s not in the ad, usually some editorial reference is made so that people know it’s available when they’re looking through a magazine, which might be while they’re waiting for an appointment or on a bus.
SnapTell provides analytics back to the advertisers about the demographic – in terms of which states are generating the most responses and the time of day when people are responding. In keeping with privacy policies, “we do not have information that identifies them individually,” he said.
SnapTell isn’t currently working with presidential candidates’ campaigns, but that’s something it might do the next time around.
