The NFC enabled Lexus ad in the April 2012 issue of Wired generated much interest in print advertising applications for NFC, but actual take-up among advertisers and publishers appears slow, and there haven’t been any high-profile launches since.
An NFC enabled advertisement in the December 2012 UK edition of Marie Claire was the first major print ad campaign to feature NFC since Wired, but it did not receive much attention from magazine subscribers, according to advertiser Nuffield Health. There have been a couple of smaller projects, as well.
“Unfortunately, this didn’t prove a successful media route for us,” Katie Breeze, Nuffield Health Communications Manager for Consumer Wellbeing, told NFC Times.
Marie Claire’s UK publisher, IPC Media, declined to say exactly how many NFC-enabled ads were sent to readers, telling NFC Times that the ad appeared in “a proportion of Marie Claire’s subscriber copies.” According to data the publisher submitted to the Audited Bureau of Circulation, Marie Claire averaged about 255,000 subscribers in the UK from January to June 2012.
Following the Nuffield Health ad in Marie Claire, no specific plans are underway for future NFC print ads in IPC Media publications, John Firth, advertising manager at IPC Innovator, told NFC Times. However, he said, “IPC is speaking to all London advertising agencies about how this new technology could work for new campaigns.”
The NFC ad, supplied by London-based marketing company Kyp, makes Nuffield Health the first advertiser in the UK to use NFC in a print ad.
Still, with the increasing prevalence of NFC-enabled phones, advertisers and publishers continue to be interested.
Perhaps the first NFC or RFID-enabled ad ran in 2009, an NFC-enabled Nike advertisement in Amusement, a French magazine, reached just 20,000 readers.
Then the 500,000 U.S. subscribers of Wired magazine received the NFC-enabled ad for the 2013 Lexus GS. Tapping the ad opened a Web site where readers could view a video and other content advertising the car’s navigation and app services.
“People always ask, what was the result here,” Matt Kammerait of Quad/Graphics, the printing house behind the Wired magazine ad, said in February at a panel discussion about nonpayment uses for NFC, organized by the MIT Enterprise Forum’s NFC Cluster in Boston. “As with any interactive print implementation, on the hard side, there were tens of thousands of unique responses over the course of the over 500,000 tags, so you do the math and figure out the response rate. If you look at the soft side, it also generated exponentially more impressions than were available just from that printing,” due to media coverage of the campaign.
But the actual results of the campaign are proprietary to Lexus, which remains unwilling to share them publicly.
And while the Wired advertisement attracted attention from the advertising industry and NFC tag suppliers, that attention does not seem to be translating into increased take-up of NFC in print ads yet.
Kammerait said some months ago that his company was discussing NFC-enabled ads with five to 10 interested clients at any one time. He told NFC Times that many of those clients have been holding to make a decision, waiting for increased adoption of NFC-enabled handsets.
Wired’s executive director of communications John Hammond told NFC Times, “we have not had significant interest to execute another NFC enabled advertisement as of yet.”
“Interest, yes. Demand, somewhat light,” Michael Manley of U.S.-based Manley RFID Consulting, which worked on the Lexus advertisement, told NFC Times. He said this spring that he was aware of two or three advertisers considering large campaigns, but none are on their way to press.
According to Manley, many potential advertisers may simply be trying to determine how to fit NFC into their wider marketing strategies. He told NFC Times that data released by Kraft Foods last October of NFC-enabled shelf promotions, pointed to consumer interest in NFC, but many companies are “grappling with ‘how should we stitch all this together’ to drive the experience they want.”
Apple’s decision not to include NFC capability in the iPhone 5 is widely considered a major factor in the NFC adoption rate
“Apple won’t implement NFC until they can say to the consumer that it will ‘just work,’ ” Kammerait of Quad/Graphics told NFC Times, citing the relatively small number of retailers with NFC-enabled point-of-sale terminals. “I think they’ll adopt when they can safely say, ‘most retailers support’ or have options for those that don’t (perhaps passbook or other bar-code based).
NFC remains more expensive and more complicated to incorporate in printed material than QR. In April’s Wired ad, NFC tags supplied by Smartrac were embedded in labels attached to the printed ad pages, a method already common for perfume samples. For December’s Marie Claire ad, the Nuffield Health ad pages were printed separately and then bound into the magazine, which is the same process used for other kinds of inserts, John Firth of IPC Innovator told NFC Times.
In comparison, QR codes can be printed directly on the ad page. Many advertisers and publishers, however, see aesthetic advantages to using embedded NFC tags rather than QR codes in print advertisements.
Consultant Manley said that he does not see price as a major hurdle to adoption of NFC for print advertising.
“Now, lower costs would certainly help,” he added, “and over time, radical reductions need to be met to reach ‘item level’ consumer goods.” NT