National CineMedia is a marketing group that targets the cinema-going audience. It places ads and events in movie theatres across the US – with approximately 17,000 screens in its network, it can hit up to 680 million cinema-goers per year. Today, NCM has announced that it will be using mobile barcodes from JAGTAG to make its advertising material interactive through a cameraphone.
What’s a JAGTAG?
A JAGTAG is a 2D barcode that is designed to be scanned by a cameraphone. It works completely through MMS, so you don’t need a smartphone to use it. With JAGTAG, you just take a picture of the code with your phone, then send it to a shortcode that will be provided. Shortly after, you’ll recieve an SMS in return, along with any linked content by SMS. This means that JAGTAG doesn’t just target smartphone owners, but any device that has a camera.
What’s the deal?
NCM is like an advertising platform. Any brand can deal with NCM, and place their promotions on various materials in the theatre: box office handouts, posters, drink cups, popcorn bags, etc. What this deal means is that NCM will offer JAGTAG barcodes to any brand it deals with from now on. Those brands can attach video clips, music, coupons or any other mobile content they like to the JAGTAG.
They don’t seem to have any advertisers lined up for the launch of this service, but the option is now there.
What we think?
These days it seems that every week brings a new JAGTAG brand deal. We’ve seen it sign Brooks sportswear and Lindemans Wine group recently – but JAGTAG seems to be having quite a bit of success with movie-related brands. It landed a big sponsorship deal with 20th Century Fox recently, with the launch of the Avatar DVD. The cinema-going audience is very diverse, and you can’t expect that a large proportion of them will have smartphones. So by choosing a mobile barcde format that can be used by a much wider selection of people (ie, anyone with a cameraphone), NCM has the potential to attract a lot more hits.
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