It's sink-or-swim in this economy, but traditional media is staying afloat

Media guru Marc Andreessen has some outrageous advice for print publications to boost their readership: commit suicide.

Playing off the tired sinking ship metaphor, he tells TechCrunch.com that newspapers and magazines need to “burn the boats” and that stronger, more powerful Web publications will rise from the ashes.

At a time when traditional media brands remain tremendously influential, we think it is ludicrous to suggest they should disappear.

Publishers of major titles such as Rolling Stone, People and Vogue have just banded together to collectively stake out their territory in the advertising world.

At Pongr, we see ourselves as a bridge between traditional media and new digital media. Both mediums can greatly benefit through cross-promotion in each other’s worlds.

Personally, I frequently learn about funny new Websites, viral videos and interesting blogs by seeing their URLs mentioned in magazines or newspapers. And as the trade ad above argues, 300 million paid print subscriptions is hardly anything to sneeze at.

Of course, digital media does allow print publications to expand their brands beyond the static page.

Pongr facilitates the union between traditional media and new media. No matter what the form of visual ad — including billboards, magazines, subway posters, TV screens and even storefronts — a quick click with a cell phone camera can deliver consumers special deals on the brands they love the most.

We recently partnered with GQ magazine to make one of its Levi’s jeans ads interactive.

At the back of the magazine, GQ readers were invited to turn to the page of the Levi’s ad, snap it with their camera phone and send it in for a special 25 percent discount code redeemable at Levis.com.

GQ marketing executive Scott Carlis says he continues to seek “more immersive experiences” for his advertising partners.

“Pongr provides a service that is enormously valuable for our clients because of the ubiquity of the mobile channel and the increasing demands for more innovative and experiential integrated marketing solutions,” he says.

This month, we’re also pleased to announce a bold partnership with W magazine. Every single ad in the latest issue will have an incentive to Pongr, as it will be tied in with a $1,000 shopping spree contest. We’re anticipating volume that has never been seen before in the magazine space!

Find out about our special image recognition technology and why consumers will welcome mobile marketing offers about brands they are already passionate about.

But back to the sink-or-swim argument about the print media, it looks like they’re answering their critics with the extremely buoyant Michael Phelps:

Traditional media may be aging, but it still is in great shape, thank you very much.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

W MAGAZINE PARTNERS WITH PONGR TO CREATE INTERACTIVE ADS FOR THE FIRST EVER SHOPPING ISSUE

Program “Mobilizes” All Ads, Making the April Issue Shop-able Cover to Cover

BOSTON, MA, March 18, 2010—Pongr, Inc., a digital marketing technology company based in Boston, MA, has been tapped by W magazine to provide turn-key mobile engagement that allows readers to get more information on brands advertising in the April issue, the magazine’s first dedicated entirely to shopping. Readers that choose to “PONGR” the ads are automatically entered for a chance to win $1000 from the magazine.

On any advertising page, readers can snap a photo of the ad and send it to w@pongr.com to receive a message from the advertising brand: a link to buy; a special shopping offer; or video such as behind-the-scenes or runway shows.

Pongr’s ad technology makes the ad pages interactive via image recognition, without requiring advertisers to modify their creative. The program equips W with an instant tool for monitoring engagement and rewards those active readers.

“W is an audience of avid shoppers, and this program offers immediate gratification,” said VP/Publisher Nina Lawrence.  “With Pongr, we’ve made the advertisements as easy to shop as the editorial in an issue focused singularly on this topic.”

Advertisers, brands, and marketers are reaching out to Pongr to help deliver mobile solutions that change the way consumers connect with brands (and vice versa). Pongr links print, TV, physical & digital advertisements to social networks via the mobile phone camera and can potentially tie ANYTHING in the physical world to a direct response marketing message.

“As publishers swiftly design programs that link digital opportunities with print, W is a shining example of how to engage readers by being accessible wherever they are,” said Pongr co-founder and CEO Jamie Thompson.  “Pongr activates an advertiser’s own ad creative without modification, and addresses readers’ already sophisticated use of technology.”

About Pongr, Inc.

Pongr is an advertising technology products and services company that focuses on mobile consumer engagement via pictures, social interaction, and brand media. For more information please visit http://www.pongr.com.

About W Magazine

W is the only pure luxury and fashion lifestyle magazine. It provides the ultimate insider experience, taking an original, provocative approach to fashion, beauty, society, art, culture, travel, and entertainment. W is published by Condé Nast, a division of Advance Publications, which operates in 24 countries and is the world leader in exceptional content creation. For more information, visit www.wmagazine.com.

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For further information contact:

Joel Idelson, Pongr, 617-938-3505 or jidelson [at] pongr [dot] com

Elissa Lumley, W magazine, 212-286-2225 or Elissa_Lumley [at] condenast [dot] com

At lunch today, a marketing executive said to me, “it used to be easy to market to people – you would show them the value points and they’d decide if they liked it enough to buy it.” The underlying theme of our conversation was around the shifts in how we, as wired (or wireless as the case may be) consumers connected to our friends, family, followers and fans, are looking for more than just a list of “features” when it comes to buying the things we do. We want relevance more than ever. We want experiences. And, we want it all connected into the multiple dimensions of our lives; online, offline, social, work, family, etc. We want it now, but not without checking in on those other worlds, all connected through the Interwebs. Online and physical are not distinct in the mind’s eye of hundreds of millions of enthusiastic mobile fans. Why not push beyond the parochial views of “traditional” media and create something better; something fresh, something fun, something valuable for consumers, brands and media purveyors alike.

So what’s the relevance to Pongr you say? Easy. Pictures and video originated from mobile are one of the new major sources of consumer and brand intelligence; intelligence for the user who’s looking for something valuable and relevant, and intelligence for the brands looking to maximize the value experience for their customer and themselves. Sharing pictures, and soon enough video, is a quick and painless way to get information about your thoughts, and possible intentions, to trusted purchasing advisers like friends or product experts.

Sharing pictures into social networks while simultaneously running Pongr’s visual search recognition system is a way to exponentially increase the value of that experience. Mobile users get to engage in a one-to-one relationship with the brand they desire, yet that 100% opt-in “search” or “connection” can easily be transformed to a one-to-many when the mobile user “shares” their mobile picture or video and any relevant Pongr provided search results, user generated tags, or comments. The “share” takes the form of a link that fits nicely within the confines of the 140 character limitations on Twitter and similar constraints for Facebook, and points to the actual user generated photo (plus the branded response if one was created by the user’s target owner).  The richness of the experience and the information sent to and from the mobile user searching for a connection with a possible purchase is unprecedented when brands, or the people responsible for their interactive marketing campaigns, customize the Pongr response.

Now back to the economics of all this mobile picture taking, sharing into social networks and Pongr’s automated visual recognition system… According to data gathered from leading consumer marketing research organizations, including the Nielson Company, the importance of socially guided influences on consumer purchasing decisions cannot be overstated.

Jonathan Carson, President of Online, International for the Nielson Company recently said, in reference to the trustedness of “social” when it comes to advertisements, “The explosion in Consumer Generated Media over the last couple of years means consumers’ reliance on word of mouth in the decision-making process, either from people they know or online consumers they don’t, has increased significantly.” You can find additional stats on the social phenomenon on trust in advertisements on Nielson’s advertising blog.

In today’s world of economic challenges and fundamental shifts in consumer purchasing patterns, it is absolutely critical that marketers find effective ways to leverage the mobile-to-social phenomenon that is occurring around the world. Consumers rightly demand an experience that tightly integrates all aspects of marketing.  So, to those reading this that want to actually sell anything to the new world order of consumers who will be more careful with their spending money, but in turn more “social” about what they buy and how they make their choices, you, our marketing friend, must find creative and effective ways for tying your distributed media efforts together.

If you want to associate your email address with your Twitter and/or Facebook account, be sure to “link” your email address here: http://pongr.com/integrate.php. By following the intuitive steps on associating your email with your social networking accounts, the pictures and advertisements that you Pongr will automatically post to your social stream. Your friends will be able to see the pictures you take and, if you get a special response, they’ll be able to see the same information by clicking the automatically generated Pongr search links.  Try it!  We want to hear your feedback.

We know some of you are patiently waiting for the new versions of our Pongr apps, but in the meantime, this is a pretty easy way to interact with Pongr’s interactive ad recognition system while sharing your pictures among Twitter and Facebook friends.

Here’s a secret… If you do choose to write something in the subject line of the email, it’ll be used as a description on the photo you took.  The description will be associated with the picture you Pongr’d when posting to Twitter or Facebook.

Print advertising should be a two-way street when it comes to communicating ideas and emotions with consumers. Unfortunately, the critical feedback loop of communication is almost always lost because there’s been no easy way to quickly and efficiently close the loop on print advertising.  Communication is, by definition, a two-way street.  Savvy media buyers are embracing the more interactive tools of viral and social marketing on the Internet so they can stretch their marketing dollars and get more bang for their buck.  Print media is still an excellent marketing channel when harnessed correctly, but why not take the effort to make it interactive with mobile users and link print advertising to the rest of our digital lives?

Follow Pongr on Twitter @PongrMedia

The trick is, print media needs to be viewed as a physical link to the digital, mobile world. Physical media is obviously important and not going away, but just as people can quickly and gracefully float back and forth between their physical and digital lives, we all are coming to expect the same from the advertisements we find appealing; subconsciously at first, but quite consciously when the advertisements fail to acknowledge our version of the “real” world that is mobile, digital and bricks & mortar all at once.  Physical and digital are really one and the same for today’s youth.  For example, walking down the street while surfing the mobile web or checking email is about as commonplace as seeing billboards, posters and signs.  Sitting on a bench while reading a magazine, texting with friends and updating multiple social networks is equally common – and we all of these things are often happening simultaneously or within two minute bursts of one another.  Thus, time, place, location, social networks and internal thoughts are more relevant than ever to advertisers. Smart publishers will notice that they could have an extremely valuable component to the marketing influence equation.

The point is, why shouldn’t print get interactive?  The rest of our lives are dynamic, mobile, tied to the Web and highly social (even if we mean in a physically isolated, but constantly connected kind of way). Print is a great way to market products and services, but just about every product we buy nowadays has an Internet component that we, as users and consumers, want to explore.

Now, this post is not intended to suggest that all print will be relevant; it won’t. As we can clearly see, many print media businesses are facing mammoth challenges in their models, reader loyalty and advertiser satisfaction. Some “old” media organizations are taking a hard-line against rapid change, but most are struggling to figure out the nuances of getting things done right and fast enough to make a difference. Ultimately, we believe that the transition will occur in phases and stages that ought to be carefully thought out, although quickly implemented. For starters, there are some easy ways to knit together existing print campaigns with opt-in calls to action, simple tie-ins to the Web and no changes to the business process around the print publishing side of ads.  By approaching the need to get interactive from a practical, yet aggressive standpoint, print businesses could not only stave off dwindling ad revenues, but actually carve out some valuable territory in the future of interactive mobile commerce. Further, by leveraging existing distribution, readership, direct sales forces and a longstanding tradition of producing relevant content to complement the advertisers that support any given publication, print publishers and marketers could actually stand out as leaders and significant connectors for both the readers and advertisers they serve.

SMS oriented marketing has been producing amazing results for brands that have executed it well and tied SMS calls to action into an integrated marketing campaign.  Although, for many, SMS has been an expensive and complicated pursuit into mobile marketing and the payoff has yet to materialize. For brands that have executed SMS well, the click-through rates have been astounding. We expect those leading-edge adopters to be among the first to try image search enabling their print media.

Like most new media marketing techniques, the results have varied based on creativity, execution and overall integration into a holistic brand management strategy.  Social media marketing has picked up a lot of momentum in 2008 and it looks like it’s going to be a strong piece of integrated interactive media campaigns moving forward. The number of brands on Facebook are growing rapidly, while Twitter is becoming an increasingly popular way for raving brand fans to communicate with one another, and in some cases, the brand itself. Twitter has made social interaction with brands faster and easier than ever.

OK, so you’re probably asking what this has to do with mobile marketing and image search, right? Well, the answer is that mobile marketing is the “big picture” next step in the evolution of integrated marketing campaigns and image search is how we’re going to get there. You see, consumers, brands, advertisers and social media mavens have made it clear that simple, fast, elegant ways of expressing their interests are what ultimately stick in the marketplace. Perhaps the most important part of that is the SIMPLE part.  If it’s easy people will try it.  If it’s hard, forget it. What better way to make linking the physical world of print media to the digital world of the Internet and social media than to leverage pictures…

The science behind image search is definitely not trivial, but Pongr can execute and integrate image search into the existing world of print and online media so that the link via image search is elegant and seamless. So, think of it like this, 90% or more of the consumers buying new mobile devices in the United States will have cameras on their mobile phones by mid 2009. Those users are fully embracing the notion of using their phone to take pictures of their friends, places and stuff.  Picture sharing through mobile has become one of the fastest growing major attractions for Facebook and other social networks.  The message is clear: people like taking pictures from their cell phones.  For marketers looking to tap into the promise of mobile marketing, what better way to actually execute an integrated media campaign than tying together print advertisements with a mobile call to action and links to the digital world!

This may sound a bit pie in the sky right now, but the pace of “what’s possible” on mobile is moving so fast that there is 100% certainly that mobile marketing will start to take shape in aggressive, ubiquitous, practical ways through 2009 and 2010. A few years from now, we will be beyond the questions of “how do I leverage location awareness in mobile marketing campaigns?” and “how can I extend the reach of print media to social networks?” and we will being to wonder what’s next…

As the entire team at Pongr embarks on a journey to help bring practical mobile marketing solutions to brands, agencies and publishers looking for smart partners (that’s us!) that can help provide better service and deeper insight into consumer trends on mobile and social networks, we will be sharing our thoughts and experiences in mobile marketing and image search through this blog.