Toyota uses mobile barcodes to reach American football fans

Toyota is using mobile barcodes as an integral part of it’s most recent marketing campaign in the Giants Stadium. The home of the New York Giants can seat over 80,000 fans, and Toyota has chosen mobile barcode company JAGTAG to to run a mobile campaign.

Who are JAGTAG?

We’ve reported on JAGTAG a few times before. It’s a mobile barcode company with an interesting twist - it’s one of the few m-coders that doesn’t require users to download a mobile application or client program. The majority of mobile barcode solutions being released today are for devices that can both take pictures and run applications - smartphones. But JAGTAG processes its barcodes off-device: consumers send a picture of the code to JAGTAG via MMS, and receive content in return. This means that both feature phones and smartphones can use the service, as long as you have a camera on there!

JAGTAG has proven to be a pretty flexible service. We’ve seen it used to deliver restaurant promotion coupons, saucy pics of swimsuit models, and help charitable movements at music festivals.

What’s the Toyota campaign?

It’s a pretty simple campaign - during the autumn, as sports fans filed into the Giants Stadium, they were given flyers explaining the JAGTAG campaign and how it worked. The flyer had the JAGTAG printed on it, and told the consumer that if they took a pic of the tag and sent it to a provided shortcode, they would receive an MMS containing a video message from Giants Quarterback and 2008 Superbowl MVP Eli Manning. JAGTAG claims an engagement rate of 9.2%, with almost 1 in every 10 attendees using the service.

From the release:

Dudley Fitzpatrick, CEO of JAGTAG: “JAGTAG is dedicated to delivering a better mobile experience and new opportunities for marketers to reach a mass audience through innovative advertising without any downloads. For Toyota, leveraging JAGTAG in their latest campaign created an opportunity to extend both the reach and interactivity of their print promotion.”

What we think?

A big part of the reason I like JAGTAG is that it doesn’t require a download. It is possibly the simplest introduction to barcodes that exists for consumers. They don’t have to do anything they didn’t already know how to - taking pics and sending MMS. That’s it.
Another thing I found interesting was how it combined the mobile channel with people physically handing out flyers - check out our article from last night about Attack! Marketing for further discussion on that topic.