Calvin Klein's Bar-Coded Billboards Peek Into an Interactive Advertising Future
Iconic fashion brand Calvin Klein has pushed the envelope with semi-nude Times Square ads, but the latest move is both subtle and aggressive. This week it replaced two major Manhattan and one Sunset Boulevard spots with a king-sized QR code (you know, those pixellated box equivalents of bar codes). People can take a picture their smartphone and the cell phone will play a 40-second ad, give links to share the ad via Facebook or Twitter and connect users to the website.
Like Twitter feeds or company URLs, QR codes will become a standard in advertisements within a few years. The impressive part is Calvin Klein taking a risk on this scale -- QR codes usually appear in magazines, not on 30-foot billboards.
It is the latest step technological step towards getting customers to willingly participate in their very own marketing. The popular Old Spice Guy now records personalized YouTube videos to people who mentioned him on a blog or social network, which, of course, creates a self-fulfilling marketing prophecy. Lego has successfully implemented augmented reality, triggered via an icon on the box, that shows potential purchasers see what the final product should look like.
The goal is not only to get audience participation, but to push the content outside of the confines of advertising. FourSquare, Gowalla, and other location-based software no doubt have their revenue models tied to advertising. One of the two winners at this week's MobileBeat Startup Competition, Micello, is another check-in software - as were about half of the startups in the running for best application and infrastructure awards.
No matter how the Calvin Klein experiment goes, it isn't a stretch to expect location-based augmented reality QR codes popping out of our magazines and into billboards, coffee cups, highway reststops and other objects in the outside world.
Photo courtesy of tiseb
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