Over the years, those in the printing industry have tried numerous ways of bringing interactivity to their printed posters – many of which have employed technologies like QR codes, NFC chips or barcodes. 

There are other systems in use too: JCDecaux has installed systems to play sound when the poster is interacted with, and other posters are equipped with motion detection which will play audio when someone is nearby. JCDecaux has also installed posters sites which dispense physical coupons and vouchers. Augustus Martin has used ‘geolocation’ – meaning that a user could scan the QR code on a poster advertising for a fast food restaurant and get directions to where the restaurant is. Novalia has touch elements to its posters, so that audio plays when a user touches different parts of the poster, campaigns include a set of DJ decks which can be played and scratched as if they were real.

Novalia also has a platform that has a Bluetooth chip which can send a signal to an external device such as a smartphone, enabling the user to interact with the poster through their own screen. Some posters have Twitter hashtags to encourage passers-by to tweet what they’ve seen to get an offer or a discount, and others ask users to go to specific websites to get an offer on a product or a service. Others enable users to take a picture using a camera with the flash revealing a different message than what can be seen by the naked eye. 

But while many of these features have been tried, the most prolific and common is still the offer code. 

“We still see 95% of clients and competitors using this method – something as simple as ‘Tube’ or ‘£25OFF’,” says James Russell, OOH expert at media agency The Specialist Works. 

A big data opportunity 

One of the key reasons to add interactivity into posters is to gain more insight into the type of user and the number of users that are interacting with the poster. In the past, advertisers have had to rely on data on footfall for shopping centres or London Underground stations as a way of measuring how many people may view a printed poster. Now, the poster can send information, in real-time, back to the advertiser. 

“For example, if Walkers crisps asked ‘what is your favourite flavour?’ and it put this onto thousands of posters around the country, users could pick their choice by interacting with the poster, the data could then be sent back to the advertiser,” says Novalia’s technical print production manager Chris Jones.

The advertiser could also learn about how many times the poster has been interacted with a day, the times when it is most interacted with, and the areas in the country where it has the most engagement.

But as Jones explains, the data is very much managed by the brand that is advertising – it’s not something that Novalia regularly looks at.

“We are involved in the physical infrastructure – so installing beacons or an RFI receiver, but many of our clients have QR codes and other elements on their printed posters and we don’t get involved in that, those are the clients’ responsibility and we don’t have access to any of the data in that instance,” he explains.

The advertisers are more likely to want to manage their own data – and perhaps combine it with a number of other incoming data sources to create a clearer picture of consumer perception about the company, or a specific product or service.

Scan-Tech’s Craig Stephens says that harvesting data continues to be “very high on the list of ‘must have’ items on its clients’ lists. However, he warns that if the campaign is not properly delivered then it can largely be a waste of time.

Are we heading for digital fatigue?

According to Russell, OOH has experienced a massive resurgence, and over the past two to three years a record amount of money has poured into this channel – with a large proportion of this going into digitising existing furniture. 

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is money well spent. 

The term ‘digital fatigue’ is something that Scan-Tech is starting to hear from clients over the past three months. 

“As the digital arena becomes vastly populated it can now be a jungle which is difficult to navigate through and where previously clients had moved away from print there are now signs of them assigning more budget from digital into the printed word,” Stephens explains.

The early days of QR codes and NFC required users to scan the poster using their smartphones – and advertisers all felt that they needed to provide this in their printed posters. 

But this requires a tremendous effort from the consumer; there is an interaction but will a consumer really want to spend their time taking out their smartphone and scanning a QR code while they’re busy shopping or on their way to work?

Not according to Augustus Martin managing director Daniel Pattison, who says that NFC and QR codes are in decline from a client perspective. 

Russell puts this down to a lack of adoption from consumers.

“The QR code never really took off, and consumers knew what they were but just didn’t engage with them. Similar innovations such as PowaTag promised so much but didn’t deliver. NFC and RFID are great technologies that should be a powerful weapon at a marketer’s disposal, but while there is scope for them to become the gold standard, the lack of conformity of consumer technology to enable these features means that large scale testing has not been carried out yet,” he states.

Stephens says that with an NFC campaign, the exact trigger point is known, so it is easy to monitor in real-time the effectiveness of a certain campaign with the additional benefit the content can be changed or altered very quickly and easily.

The main issue is that Apple does not support open NFC, meaning that it is incredibly hard for advertisers who want access to every consumer – as so many consumers are using Apple devices.

This leads Russell to believe that the idea of an offer code is still – and probably for some time longer—going to be the best technology to interact with printed OOH.

So what now?

With unsuccessful results of using NFC, and QR codes, Pattison believes that companies have to find new ways of incorporating them into their campaigns.

“Everyone has been so immune to putting their details onto a form or scanning something to get an offer,” he says.

But he has seen good examples of codes being used by some companies.

Starbucks ask users to scan a poster which directs them to install the Starbucks app. Once installed, users can make an order and skip the queue.

Meanwhile, a retailer in Europe asked consumers to scan a QR code on its poster every month that they do their shopping, in return for free groceries.  

“That’s a great idea – whereas intangible offers or the promise of maybe winning something are not worth interacting with,” Pattison suggests.

Those who do interact with posters with intangible offers are perhaps not the kind of consumers that the advertisers are aiming to target; they want to engage with a consumer that is likely to spend money with them in the long-term, not just enter in details or scan a code for a one-time offer.

Pattison says that now NFC and QR codes are used as part of a joined-up offer that normally involves more than one channel of communication. He also says that successful campaigns are now focusing on personalising and tailoring the messaging that consumers see rather than the interactive elements. 

“The message we give to our clients is that it has to be smart but everyone has to get it straight away.

“We can produce something that can catch data back and forward but if you’re not getting someone to interact with it, it’s an awful lot of effort for very little return,” he adds.

Indeed, as a standalone proposition, the data collated isn’t necessarily that useful for advertisers anyway. Companies now have access to so much data that merely knowing that 300 random consumers have interacted with a printed poster in a town centre at 12pm on a Saturday, isn’t going to drastically help with their knowledge of consumer habits or even perception of the brand.

But perhaps that’s missing the point altogether – the main reason for printed posters in the first place is to increase the visibility of a brand. The associated offers, QR codes, hashtags or audio are ways of interacting with a consumer – which can create a relationship, but that is the secondary purpose for many of these posters. 

If the advertiser wants to be seen as a brand for teens –perhaps it will associate itself with DJ decks and a certain genre of music, or if it wants to be seen as supporting a specific campaign it can do so in numerous ways, as Maltesers did with its Braille billboard. The interactive printed posters will still be around for the foreseeable future, because they’re a way of grabbing consumers’ attentions. Whether they’re worth the extra money and effort compared to traditional printed posters is still up for debate.