Advertising Marketing PR, Mobile

Shazam’s ads program could be the beginning of so much more

unnamedIt’s taken me a few days to figure out what it is that I found so intriguing about the news that Shazam and National CineMedia would be partnering to let users of the “identify by sound” app dig into more information about NCM’s pre-movie ads.

Finally I realized that this kind of functionality, which has been available for a while with select TV ads, has the potential to succeed where a technology like QR codes has so far eluded mass adoption. In fact, this is the rare occasion where an app that ran in the background and send push notifications could actually be kind of cool.

If Shazam (or something like it…I have no particular allegiance to that particular app) were running in the background and detected an ad that had additional content it could create a notification to “Click here for more information about X” on the user’s smartphone automatically. Right now the biggest obstacle, at least to me, to doing something like this is actually pulling the phone out of my pocket or otherwise grabbing it in time to still be able to capture the ad’s noise. But if it was running in the background that step would be taken out and the further information that lies behind the action would be there whenever I was ready to access it. Even accounting for those who are using their devices right at the moment a Shazam-able ad comes on this would be useful since the only thing that’s harder than getting somebody to do something is getting them to stop what they’re currently doing and do something else. So this would allow them to defer the experience to later.

I really believe this would be easier than the current QR code experience, which right now has been filled with widespread adoption by marketers (seriously, I see these things everywhere) but lack of adoption by users, who don’t know what exactly to do when confronted with those little squiggly lined-boxes on signs. Part of my thinking is there’s just such a difference in the app experience. “Use Shazam” is a much easier call to action that everyone will at least kind of understand. But there’s no single branded app that people can use for QR codes. And “Search the App Store for any of a number of QR readers, find one you kind of like, open it up and hold your camera over this box” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

(Why exactly haven’t Google or Apple come out with defaults for QR code reading? Seems like a massive missed opportunity to, by putting it right there front and center in the user experience.)

Basically 1) There’s an opportunity to make the “find out more about this ad” experience much more seamless and 2) Part of that would involve letting the recipient defer that deep-dive for a time that’s more convenient for them. That’s the point of apps like Instapaper, Facebook’s Save, Pocket and others. So it’s only natural for it to eventually come to advertising as well, particularly when the educational opportunities are so rife with potential.