How a London Tech Start-up & BMW Plan to Revive Print Advertising

A London tech start-up has unveiled Europe’s first magazine advertising campaign enabled with near-field communication (NFC) tags.

Tamoco has teamed up with BMW placing small chips inside a magazine allowing it to track and analyse readers’ responses using its cloud-based software platform.

Spiegel Wissen, a quarterly spin-off of the world-renowned Der Spiegel, is the first European magazine to ever use the technology in this way.

Merging new and old technology is increasingly being seen as a vital route to helping publishers stem declines in traditional ad revenues which still underpin their businesses. According to a recent report by PwC, print ad revenue will fall 4% to $12.8 billion in 2014, dropping to $9.3 billion by 2018. Consumer magazines' digital ad revenue climbed 22.4% to $3.9 billion in 2014 and will reach $7.6 billion by 2018, it claimed.

Cheap ways to combine online and offline campaigns – which are often conducted by wholly different teams – could prove crucial in cutting costs but delivering better value for publishers and brands.

Tamoco, which has developed both technology and the software platform it runs on, is a global leader in proximity mobile marketing – where the experience can be tailored by tracking a person’s location and interests through their phone.

The two-year old company has pioneered this technology winning plaudits for campaigns run on behalf of leading global brands. In New York, queues of people piled into the phone giant AT&T’s shops as part of a tie-up with the Tribeca Film Festival. One customer every four seconds interacted with the promotion.

In London last month, Tamoco placed NFC tags into beer mats so party-goers could order taxies home, with Uber tempting new customers through vouchers.

See an ITV clip on the Uber digital beer mats below.

Tamoco says that a key benefit of using its proximity technology in this way is giving marketers access to real-time analytics. This enables firms to understand how people interact with their campaigns while plugging in other data sources they may have access to, such as sales histories. By combining these data with information collected from Twitter, Facebook and other sources, brands can build up valuable insight on their customers.

The ultimate aim is for brands to be able to tailor their marketing output to deliver a better customer experience. Engaging responsibly ensures those who want to be talked to are communicated with in a way that is both personal and ultimately, entertaining.

This new revolutionary NFC campaign can be found in the latest edition of “SPIEGEL WISSEN: Das Auto von Morgen” (“The car of tomorrow”) featuring a four page BMW i3 and i8 advert.

Tapping a smartphone once on the advert instantly downloads the BMW i app. Using Tamoco’s platform, customers interacting with the print ad are directed to the most relevant content, based on which operating system they use or how often they have tapped the ad previously.

Maximilian Birner, Tamoco’s founder and CEO said: “There’s a certain ‘cool factor’ to using digital technology which helps brands amplify their own appeal to customers. It’s a two-prongued(?) route of simplifying the way customers engage with a brand but also ensuring that you’re enhancing their experience in a relevant way. The moment you offer people content of no value, they switch off. We weren’t surprised Der Spiegel was prepared to take this bold and exciting step in supporting a NFC print campaign, as it’s perfectly suited to BMW’s brand and customer base and we believe there’s huge potential to blur the lines between print and digital advertising further.”

Sam Amrani, Tamoco’s executive chairman, added: “Ultimately the value for brands is being able to see exactly how people respond to your campaigns and ensure that, for example, you’re not offering free hamburgers to vegetarians. The value of knowing your customers is emotional and financial - the more meaningful you engage the more confidence people will have in your brand.”

The campaign was planned by Mediaplus and Plan.net, in cooperation with the Smart Media Alliance (SMA), an industry-led initiative fostering research, education and implementation of NFC technology, and managed by Tamoco’s proximity platform, which also includes support for Bluetooth beacons, WiFi, and Geo-fences.