You remember how it goes: you fill out a form, mail it out with a copy of your receipt and wait patiently for a check, check card, coupon, or some other reward to be mailed back. 

In the meantime, you hope your letter reaches its destination, hope it doesn’t get lost in the mail, hope that if for any reason you don’t qualify they know to contact you to get it fixed. During the six to eight weeks you’re waiting, all contact has been lost with the brand. In fact, you have probably forgotten about the brand altogether and have difficulty remembering what the rebate was for when it does arrive.

This same sequence of events occurs every time something needs to be physically validated. 

Why are we still using Pony Express era technology to solve this problem? The process shouldn’t be so broken. This is why we made SnippCheck.

We get as frustrated as most of you do when applying for a rebate. So, we assembled components of our Mobilize Me platform to fix rebates. Only recently have a confluence of technologies even made this possible.

Wait a minute…what technology exists now that didn’t exist 5 years ago? I understand that smartphones are more prevalent, but the Internet existed – surely it could be done through desktop sites?

Yes, the Internet has been at mass adoption for some time, but very few people have scanners connected to their computers. What exists now, but didn’t exist five years ago, is mass adoption of scanners. In fact, 62% of us have a high-resolution document scanner on our person at any point during the day – our cellphone camera.

Phones have hit an image resolution that make them effective scanners. Moreover, each photograph taken by a phone is a unique fingerprint, a feature that can be exploited to allow verification of authenticity.

How is this done?

Smartphone adoption has added a level of personalization to the wired web. Our phones are incredibly personal. We sleep with our significant others beside us, and we sleep with our phones beside us. Our children wake us, so do our phones. Our phones are as unique as we are, which makes it easier to verify the uniqueness of people applying for a rebate or entering a contest.

How does this help me stay more connected to my customer?

The mail-in rebate process is incredibly opaque and it can be weeks before the brand even knows who their customers are. In our view, this is a major flaw with rebates as they’re done today.

By keeping everything digital, the rebate process becomes transparent. Customers are able to check the status of their rebates immediately after submission. Brands can follow up with opted-in customers, leading to a positive brand experience.

How about delivery?

We created SnippCheck to support all existing vehicles for delivery, so nothing needs to change from the traditional process – except that delivery happens much sooner and it costs a lot less to validate. Of course, using a digital workflow allows new delivery pathways, such as iTunes gift cards, Passbook integrations, movie tickets, PayPal payments. If it exists, we can integrate with it. 

This sounds complicated, how long does it take to set up? 

Our platform is built in such a way that time-to-launch can be measured in days, not weeks.

Want to get started?

Give us a call. We’re listening.

Learn more about SnippCheck at http://www.snippcheck.com.

There’s no doubt that QR codes have gotten a bad name amongst the media cognoscenti. Much ado has been made about the Tumblr blog Pictures Of People Scanning QR Codes (spoiler alert: the site’s empty, implying no one does it). The fact is that QR codes have been abused and misused by so many people that it has created a backlash against them (if you’re curious to see just how bad QR code implementations can be, take a look at qrackd.com).

It is true though that QR codes have lost some of their shine – their magnetism even. And yet…according to a survey conducted by Pitney Bowes, fully 19% – or almost a fifth of the US population – have used QR codes. Twitter, by contrast, has only been used by 12% of the entire US population. And according to eMarketer, when you look at adults aged 18-34, 36% of them have used a QR code at least once.  Like it or not, QR codes are here to stay – and to not add it to your arsenal of tools as a mobile marketer would be shortsighted.

As I mentioned in the Mobile Marketer article, the fact that QR codes have lost their shine is not necessarily a bad thing. Because they have been so overused in the past, the hope is that mobile marketers today will be a lot more judicious in their use of QR codes going forward. No longer will they slap QR codes onto any piece of collateral much the way McDonald’s serves fries with everything. No longer will they send unsuspecting victims to non-mobile optimized websites. No longer will they obfuscate the call to action and just assume that consumers will do what they want. Marketers are finally coming to the realization that like all technologies, QR codes are only enablers – and at the end of the day, its not the technology you use,  but how you use them that matters. And that if they want to get users to utilize QR codes, then they have to respect the effort that users are putting in to do so and respond in kind, by providing them with a payoff commensurate with the effort.

QR codes also aren’t the only games in town anymore. As my colleague John Fauller pointed out, over the past couple of years we have seen a proliferation of mobile response options available to marketers. Even as little as two years ago, you pretty much had to choose between text messaging and QR codes. Today you have a wider palette with image recognition, NFC, AR, digital watermarks. So as a marketer you can now choose the technology that best fits your specific needs – further ensuring that marketers only use QR codes when they are best suited for the task at hand.

QR codes can be a good way to build engagement and drive interaction, but certainly aren’t the only way to do so. QR codes work well in utilitarian contexts – as identifiers (e.g. in loyalty cards), for providing dense amounts of information (nutrition info on packs) or for getting access to very specific pieces of content.

When used appropriately QR codes can indeed build engagement and drive interaction. The problem is that because QR codes are free and easy to generate they’re being thrown onto everything – reducing their overall perceived utility for customers.

Probably the single biggest issue with QR codes today remains the need to have an app to scan the codes and the need to launch the app to scan the code. It’s a process that is time consuming and inelegant. The Holy Grail for QR code marketing would be a passive, always-on QR scanner such that all one has to do is just point the phone camera in the direction of the QR code to launch the content. 

Are you listening Apple and Android?

We’ve assembled this handy glossary of the commonly used terms on our site (organized alphabetically for your browsing pleasure) and used plain english to describe them, all so I can finally explain to my grandmother what we do. Spoiler alert: there are tons of acronyms!

AR: Augmented Reality (AR) is an interactive experience where a visual overlay is introduced onto a view of the physical world. Remember the Terminator films when Arnold had a sidebar that gave him extra information about whatever he looked at? That was an example of augmented reality – and it’s not just science fiction anymore. In mobile, AR experiences can be triggered by cellphone location or by images viewed through the camera. It can deliver sound, video, photos and much more to the user. A great example of mobile-based AR is an interactive guide for museums: users can hold their phone in front of any artwork in the museum and are given additional information about that particular piece.

Digital Watermark: “Watermarking” is the process of hiding digital information in a carrier signal. A digital watermark is a kind of marker or tag secretly embedded in a noise-tolerant signal such as audio or image data. Digital watermarks are used to verify the authenticity of documents but can also be used as a mobile response activation.

Face In The Hole: Face-in-the-Hole marries the camera phone with sophisticated facial recognition and image manipulation technologies to create fun, viral mobile campaigns that can be leveraged by brands. It’s the mobile version of those cardboard cutouts where you would stick your head through the hole to take a photo of yourself as a mermaid.

Geofence: A virtual radius around a real-world geographic area used to enable location based events. Brands can use geofencing to deliver coupons or special offers to customers who happen to be passing by their store.

Geotarget: Mobile marketing targeted to users in a certain location determined by GPS, phone area code, IP address, ISP details or other information. Brands can use geotargeting to target a product to those best suited to receiving it.

Image Recognition: Image recognition is a technology that allows computers to recognize particular objects within images by matching them against a database of stored object images. In the context of mobile, brands can use image recognition as a response activation. For example, they could encourage consumers to take photos of their logo to receive special offers.

MMS: Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) is a standard way to send messages that include multimedia content to and from mobile phones. MMS allows you to message others with photos, video or audio.

Mobile Optimized Site: A website that has been especially formatted to be legible on a mobile device. The site could be a static mobile site or a responsive web site. Many of the websites you view on your phone are mobile optimized but not all (Fun fact: www.google.com is, but www.apple.com is not.).

Mobile Response: A set of technologies that leverage the mobile phone to provide interactivity to static traditional media such as print, radio, TV. Mobile response technologies include SMS, MMS, QR codes, digital watermarks, NFC, AR, image recognition and more. Using mobile response, consumers can get more information about a particular product in a print ad, enter contests and sweepstakes displayed on a billboard, tweet about a show while watching a TV and much more.

Mobile Workflow: The process of detailing and executing marketing and technology programs through consumer interaction and behavior on a mobile device.

NFC: Near Field Communication (NFC) is a set of standards for devices to establish radio communication with each other by touching them together or bringing them closely together. Most forms mobile response require you to scan an image or launch an app to launch an action. With NFC, all you have to do is tap your phone against the terminal to make it work, so it’s a lot more convenient to use.

OCR: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) decodes printed type from an image into computer searchable text. Since virtually all mobile phones today have cameras, OCR can be used to extract meaningful text from photos. For example, I could take a photo of a receipt and have it automatically added to my expense report. Or take a photo of a business card and have it seamlessly added to my contact book.

Pull Messaging: One-time content delivered to a consumer’s mobile after they request it.

Purchase Validation: Purchase Validation allows customers to submit receipts for coupons, rebates, expenses and loyalty programs using just their phone. It provides an entirely mobile workflow to validate consumer purchases and other actions.

Push Messaging: A message delivered to a consumer’s mobile device without active participation by the user. Think incoming text messages, or banking and game alerts.

QR Code: A QR code is a two dimensional bar code that has information encoded within it. In a mobile context a QR code usually has a URL encoded in it, and scanning the QR code takes you to the mobile website pointed to by the URL. QR Codes are typically used in print or on billboards as a mobile response mechanism.

QR In The Cloud: QR In The Cloud allows you to scan QR codes – even if you don’t have a QR code scanning app on your phone. You simply take a photo of any QR code and send it in by messaging or email – and we send you back the decoded text,

Responsive: Responsive web design (RWD) is a design approach in which designers create one design template that automatically adjusts to any device screen size, whether it be mobile, desktop, tablet or TV. It is built on a flexible grid system.

SMS: Short Message Service (SMS) is the text messaging service component of phone, web, or mobile communication systems. Pretty much everyone today has sent or received a text message, even your grandma.

Universal Scanner: A mobile app that can support any mobile response technology including QR codes, MS Tags, Digital Watermarks, UPC barcodes and image recognition technology. With this app, you can do almost anything (at least in terms of mobile response).

YOLO: Not technically a mobile phrase, but worth including in any self-respecting glossary. You Only Live Once (YOLO) was a phrase popularized by Drake and now extremely overused by millennials. Ok. I’ll admit, I’m guilty of this too. YOLO.

At Snipp we recently launched SnippCheck, our own mobile receipt processing and just recently wrapped up our first receipt processing campaign with Arm & Hammer Baking Soda (consumers could submit receipts through email or messaging and got back a $10 off coupon at 1-800-FLOWERS.com; see ahoffer.com for details) – and we wanted to share some of the learnings we had from applying our mobile receipt processing solution to a real world campaign. (Note: the learnings here are from doing a post-mortem of the campaign and not just from the real-time application of our technology during the campaign).

1. Mobile Receipt Processing Is Hard To Do
Before we go further I want to stress that receipt processing is hard, and that receipt processing with a mobile phone is even harder. Receipts tend to be printed on thermal paper (which fade over time) or using dot-matrix printers (which makes it hard to recognize the characters) or tend to be manhandled quite often (resulting in creases and crumples that further impair character recognition). Furthermore, taking photos of receipts with your mobile phones creates its own set of issues: camera resolution on mobile phones isn’t great, making images difficult to read; blurriness is quite common because of the need to hold your phone close to the receipt (and the inability of the phone to focus appropriately); and the receipt images tend to be skewed and angled because the photo’s taken from a mobile phone. (Technically we knew all this already so its not really a learning, and we’ve already built a pretty cool solution to make mobile receipt processing as foolproof as possible, but its worth pointing out all this for your edification.) 

2. Not All Receipts Are Made Equal
Its trite but true. The single biggest variant in determining the success of applying optimal character recognition (OCR) to automatically process receipts is image quality – and nothing impacts image quality quite as much as the quality of the original image. During the Arm & Hammer campaign, we noticed significant variance in the image quality of the incoming receipts, and that variance was directly correlated to the stores the receipts were coming from. Put differently, the single biggest determinant of whether a receipt could be processed automatically was which retailer it came from. Typically, large retailers like Walmart, Target have clearly printed receipts – while others don’t. And it wasn’t just the clarity of the printing, but also the formatting and clarity of the information that also improved readability. Receipts from these retailers had scanning success rates of over twice those of the laggards. The good news was that the top 5 retailers accounted for about 50% of all submitted receipts.

3. What You Look For Makes A Difference 
The more focused you are in what you are looking for, the better your OCR success rates will be. OCR success rates tend to be higher when searching just for numbers than when searching for alphanumeric characters. So looking for product UPC codes or SKU numbers (wherever possible) tended to produce better results than when looking for product descriptions.

4. Image Pre-processing Is An Absolute Must
Ask any self-respecting OCR practitioner and they will tell you that image pre-processing is a key part of the secret sauce in OCR. In the case of receipts there are a few tricks we found particularly helpful:

• Binarization, the process of converting every pixel in the image to black or white, enhanced the contrast of the image
• Asking consumers to circle the product in question and then cropping the image to remove all extraneous data
• Deskewing and line straightening to account for photos being taken at an angle

7. OCR Only Gets You So Far  
The truth is that you will never get 100% accuracy with OCR as it stands today. Anyone claiming to get above 90% consistently is probably fudging – especially when it comes to receipts. For real world applications you have to have a manual backup – a real set of eyes that will look at outlier and flagged results. Our SnippCheck solution has been built on that premise – results that fail the OCR are routed to our operations team that looks through the receipt to ensure no false negatives.

End Note: KISS 
Technology can only take you so far. At the end of the day, the structure of a program involving receipt processing can have a huge impact on the technology’s ability to support the program. For instance, requiring that consumers circle the product on a receipt so the OCR can focus on the right part of a receipt makes a huge difference. Similarly, making intelligent tradeoffs between the amount of data you want to capture and the speed and accuracy of the receipt processing are critical.

CASEY WILL BE PROVIDING HIS CASE FOR FLAT DESIGN AND RITESH WILL BE REBUTTING WITH HIS CASE FOR SKEUOMORPHIC.

What Are We Talking About?

Flat design is exactly as it sounds; it is a design aesthetic that eschews three-dimensional realism. There are no text effects, no simple single-color buttons, no shadows, no dependency on real world items, just simple, two-dimensional design. Windows 8 is perhaps the most well known example of this style of interface design, being entirely flat.

Windows 8 Start Screen. Completely Flat! (via Fast Co. Design)

Skeuomorphic design refers to the practice of “borrowing” real world objects or design elements and reproducing them in a different (in this case digital) context, even though they may have no functional use in the new context. The most famous digital examples of this aesthetic come from Apple: its Calendar, iBooks and Notes apps that look exactly like their real-world counterparts, down to the stitched leather binding, wooden bookshelves and the ripped page edges.

Apple’s iCal (via support.apple.com)

Casey: Flat is the Future.

At Snipp, we recently published two landing pages that highlight some innovative new solutions we’ve been working on: SnippCheck & SnippWine. As the lead designer and front-end developer, I found myself designing these pages ‘flat’, which is what started this argument. Here’s why I think flat wins:

1. Mobile And More.

We connect to the digital world with an ever-increasing number of devices, all with various resolutions and screen sizes. Flat design, by virtue of its simplicity and the disavowal of unnecessary graphical assets, makes it a lot easier to design for multiple screens.

By relying on CSS-driven attributes that are rendered in-browser, flat designs are more responsive and optimized no matter the resolution or size of the screen. 

Also, on small screens with the minimal real estate they afford, flat design puts the focus where it should be: on the functionality.

2. It’s Better Design.

Flat better represents today’s post-modern minimalist aesthetic and gives designers the ability to bring typography, layout, color theory and white space to the forefront of design strategy. 

Instead of putting tedious thought and effort into gradients, shadows, bevels, etc., designers and web strategists can spend time on the visual hierarchy and the actual interfaces, not just stylizing them.

Flat also avoids the reliance on outdated, real world items that younger generations have had no exposure to – like flipping a rolodex or turning a radio tuner. 

3. It Fosters Creativity and Innovation.

Not relying on skeuomorphic items allows designers to reimagine interfaces and interactivity in new and exciting ways. It is foolish to adhere to physical constraints when they are not applicable in the digital world. 

Clear is a great example. The list and task-making app stands out from all others by ditching the checklist metaphor that is prevalent in virtually every other rival app. Instead, the designers focused on how users could interact with a task manager through touch (drag, pinch, swipe and expand), color and typography. 

4. It Translates Globally.

In targeting a global audience, it’s important to employ design that is independent of any one specific cultural context. Incorporating artifacts specific to a particular context in your design risks the entire interface becoming lost in translation. 

Ritesh: Why Skeuomorphic Design (Still) Works.

1. It Works.

People seem to forget that skeuomorphism forms the basis of the user interface for modern day computing. The “desktop”, “files”, “documents” and “folders” are all skeuomorphic artifacts. Even today, examples of skeuomorphism litter our everyday digital landscape (quite literally, as in the case of the Trash can). Most icons are skeuomorphic (“save”, “print”, “search”) as are most of the basic Web elements (pages, checkboxes, buttons, sliders). The best argument for skeuomorphism is the empirical, pragmatic one: it’s good because it is everywhere and it has survived the test of time.

2. It Makes Technology More Approachable.

Skeuomorphism provides recognizable context to new technologies, making them more approachable and easier to understand. For example, using the finger pointer cursor to indicate a hyperlink that can be clicked or providing a shutter click sound when taking photos on your phone both leverage tropes from the real world that people are familiar (and therefore more comfortable) with. 

3. It Provides Better Usability.

Skeuomorphism can provide better usability to digital apps by mimicking their real-world counterparts . For example, making the calculator interface on an iPhone look like a real calculator allows someone to start using the application immediately, because they are familiar with how a physical calculator works. 

4. It’s Fun and Whimsical.

Let’s be honest: all function and no form make for very little fun. Adding skeuomorphic design touches to interfaces gives them a personality and makes them stand out. You may not need it, but you can’t tell me the first time (and every time since) you swiped your finger across the iPad you didn’t get a little smile on your face. On the other hand, flat design can be, well, flat.

The Consensus

The fact is that “skeuomorphism/flat” is not an “either/or” question. The answer as to which design philosophy is most appropriate to pursue needs to be examined on a case-by-case basis. Each brings advantages to the table. Skeumorphic design is better suited for interfaces where familiarity and approachability are at a premium whereas flat design works well on small screens and for expert interfaces. Adherence to one shouldn’t preclude the use of the other where appropriate – although in moderation (Apple, take note).

Is that a cop out answer? Perhaps. 

Will it lead to better design? Probably.

It is a view that begins with the very first thought a customer has about what they want, then to the factors that influence that initial thought and finally the incentives that drive them to make a purchase.

Are existing shopper marketing firms smart enough to recognize how close they are to building this customer view? If not, a spunky start up may capture their clients with innovative tools.

Many larger consumer marketing companies like News America have invested heavily in print and online platforms to disseminate coupons, but exist in separate silos. They have no way today of capturing actual offline purchase behavior motivated by any of the incentives provided either through a physical (print, outdoor, in-store, in-home) or digital (online, mobile apps, social media) channel. These companies remain the closest to building a data-centric world that will allow for incredibly personalized marketing. 

Marketing success will only come from viewing mobile not only as a channel but a tool to integrate their existing offerings. The solution is to strengthen mobile offerings that bridge the divide.

To do so, three key points need to be addressed:

1. Know who your customer is and track them through the purchase cycle.
2. Understand what your customer is looking for and provide a relevant incentive.
3. Determine if they actually used the incentive to make a purchase and validate that the incentive works.

If existing infrastructure investments do not address the three points above, marketers are not taking advantage of the power of mobile. Subsequently, brand spend is simply a “spray and pray” method.

In part two of this series, I will address core strategies to help shopper marketers take advantage of mobile, but for now, I have to go back to helping my clients take advantage of mobile.

Guess what? It is too much to ask.

I was installing a HP printer over the weekend and dutifully scanned the QR code on the package to get the set up instructions – to my horror the link to the site gave me a “Coming Soon” splash page. Now if this was a BRAND new printer I could still live with that, but this is a year old printer that I was moving from our old office! Give me a break.

Here is lies a sad splash screen. C’mon HP!

But they don’t have to be.
 

The original QR code specifications had a great deal of flexibility built into them, and eventually QR code creators caught on and started to experiment with variations in color, style, background and imagery. Custom QR codes, as these stylized QR codes have come to be known, are fast becoming quite popular – and with good reason, since they can be a lot better looking than their dowdy black-and-white cousins. But like all divas, they need to be handled with care.
 

There are a number of sites that allow you to create custom QR codes, but creating good custom QR codes is as much art as it is science, so caveat emptor to all who try.
 

Below are some good general principals and guidelines to keep in mind:

1. Test Early and Test Often
Any changes you make to a QR code can impact its readability, so testing it along the way is absolutely critical. Also – and this is just as important – make sure you test your final custom QR code on multiple different QR code reader apps. Not all QR code reader apps are built the same, and just because it works on one, doesn’t mean it will work on another (something we found out the hard way…)

2. Experiment. Create. Refine.
Creating a custom QR code is more art than science. Don’t be afraid to experiment with styles and colors until you create what’s right for you. Just don’t forget to test it when you are done!
 

3. Short URLs Make Good Custom QR Codes
Always use a short URL in custom QR codes. Short URLs allow you to change the destination URL at any time later in the campaign, they enable measurement and metrics for QR code scans, and they also improve the readability of custom QR codes by making them less dense. So yes, always use them.

4. Color Means Contrast
Custom QR codes don’t have to be black and white, but they do need sufficient contrast between the foreground and background to ensure the QR code reader can tell which is which (technically speaking the contrast ratio should be greater than 4:1). Also, the foreground should always be a darker color than the background (some QR code readers don’t play nice when you invert the colors).

5. Its All About Style Over Substance
Just because regular QR codes are all square doesn’t mean custom QR codes have to be. QR code modules (as the pixels within a QR code are called) can come in many shapes and sizes: dots, torn squares, triangles, and many more. When it comes to QR codes, diversity is a good thing.

6. Size Matters
Don’t make your finished custom QR code any smaller than 0.75″ if you want to make sure it can be scanned by most phones. A good rule of thumb is to ensure that the QR code size is 1/10th the distance from which it is likely to be scanned. So for a magazine where you’re likely to be 10″ away from the code, a 1″ code is good; for a billboard 10 meters away, the QR code should be 1 meter in size.

7. Redundancy is a good thing. Redundancy is a good thing.
All QR codes have redundancy built in to them and you can change the amount of redundancy in a QR code. The higher the redundancy, the greater the resilience of the QR code to interference (smudges, torn edges, image overlays etc.). However, higher redundancy also makes a QR code more dense and hence a harder to read. Ideally, use a short URL and medium to high redundancy.

8. Picture this. Imagine that.
You can insert images onto your custom QR codes for extra oomph. To do so, you should set redundancy to its highest level – which allows an image no greater than 30% of the total size to be placed onto the custom QR code. Since there are certain areas of the QR code that cannot be blocked, if you’re using image overlays, be sure to test your QR code thoroughly!

9. Look, but don’t touch (at least certain parts)
The format of a QR code prevents designers from altering or blocking certain areas. The eyes are used to orient a QR code scanner and should never be blocked. Similarly the one-block margin around a custom QR code must be preserved to ensure proper scanning.
 

10. And finally, you’re only as good as where you’re going…
Other than testing all the time, if there was one other thing you need to keep in mind for custom QR code campaigns, its this: make sure its worth the effort for your users. Ensure that the destination site is mobile enabled and that your users get at least what they expected, if not a lot more. Nobody likes a good-looking QR code that leads to a bad experience.
 

We are very excited to welcome in the new year but first would like to show you what we were up to in 2012. We made a quick recap video – highlighting some of our favorite campaigns and projects in mobile marketing and technology.

Happy New Year from all of us at Snipp!

So without further ado, here’s my top mobile trends for marketers in 2013:
 

1. 2013 Will Be The Year of Mobile…Again.
Its always easiest to start with the most obvious. 2012 was something of a tipping point, what with smartphones overtaking feature phones and accounting for over 50% of all phones in the US, and that number is just going to keep going up and up the S-curve in 2013 (mini-prediction: smartphone ownership is going to grow a lot, lot faster than research firms  are predicting; prediction models look to past data to predict future growth and typically use linear growth rates – very few get hockey stick growth right and most tend to under-predict it). As a result, expect to see more of everything mobile: more mobile web-browsing, more mobile-commerce, more app consumption, more mobile devices.
 

2. Marketing Budgets For Mobile Will Become Mainstream.
In 2012, people consumed 11% of their media through mobile (eMarketer), while mobile accounted for 23% of total time spent online (GfK), but mobile accounts for less than 2% of total media spend. For those who are old enough to remember, we once saw similar discrepancies between time spent and ad dollars spent for the Web overall – and eventually ad spending caught up. Expect the same to happen for mobile. This isn’t going to happen overnight – or even all in 2013 – but expect to see many more companies carve out discrete marketing budgets for mobile marketing (and not just for experimentation). Mondelez (the company formerly known as Kraft Foods) recently announced it would spend 10% of its global marketing budget on mobile. Expect more to do the same. 
 

3. Shopper Marketing Will Be THE Mobile Area of Focus in 2013.
People may think I’m going out on a big limb here, but I’m not really. Expect to see mobile extensively utilized for all aspects of shopper marketing, and on a much wider scale, especially for couponing, loyalty and geotargeting. Juniper Research recently predicted that mobile coupon usage would spike 30% in 2013, and innovations like Apple’s Passbook, a slew of new apps, and mobile receipt processing solutions (like ours), will only hasten the trend. Expect to see a lot more national mobile-based promotions, local geo-targeted coupon campaigns, easier-to-use loyalty programs and the like.

4. Mobile Commerce Yes. Mobile Payments No.
Mobile commerce will continue to grow at near triple digits as it did in 2012 as more people get comfortable shopping through apps and on mobile optimized sites. Technologies like Card.IO continue to make the overall process easier, and most large sites now support some form of one click shopping for mobile. But although Apple may well integrate NFC into its next version of its device, and more and more innovative mobile payment options will proliferate, mobile payments will continue to remain a small and insignificant niche in the overall payments market – for 2013 at least. Consumers continue to be suspicious of mobile/electronic payments (except in pre-paid formats, e.g. subway passes) and such behavior will take some time to change, particularly since US consumers already have a cashless payment alternative that works ubiquitously: their credit cards. (Note: I don’t really consider Apple iTunes purchases or Square transactions as mobile payments since they are both credit card driven).

5. The Apple/Android Phone Duopoly Will Persist.
My apologies in advance to Microsoft and Blackberry, but they’re both a little too little, a little too late. Windows Phone 8 and Blackberry OS 10 devices will remain small niches in the overall smartphone market, and most marketers and app developers (those not receiving development funds from the manufacturers) will simply ignore them. Dollars will be better spent optimizing experiences for iOS and Android than for creating them for Windows and Blackberry phones. Windows tablets may make more of a headway given the massive installed base of PCs and the extreme portability offered by a Windows-compatible tablet, but the phone market will remain a two horse race next year.
 

6. Fewer Apps. More HTML5 Websites.
Whilst Mark Zuckerberg may have ignited a firestorm by noting that adopting HTML5 for its  mobile app was probably the biggest strategic mistake the company made, the truth is that for most marketers and for most marketing needs, HTML5 websites can make a lot more sense than mobile apps (with the exception of when you need phone specific capabilities). Consumers and marketers both are fast realizing that you don’t need an app for everything, and creating multiple versions of an app has real costs, as does updating and maintaining them. For delivering content, HTML5 websites are cheaper to develop, easier to support across devices and more effective for consumers. Tools like our Site Builder make it much easier to create and deploy HTML5 mobile sites.   
 

7. Less Designing for the Content, More Designing for the Context.
This is an early bird prediction. Responsive web design was a clear trend for 2012, and will be for 2013 as well. And with good reason, given the proliferation of different screen sizes and device types, which will continue to be a headache for designers and developers. Expect smart marketers in 2013 to move beyond responsive design and tailor mobile experiences not just to a device but to a context as well. For example, leveraging location or time of day to provide distinct and differing experiences (e.g. a local news site providing more traffic information on the home page during rush hours; or a content site adapting the content depending on whether its a smartphone or tablet).
 

8. More Innovation in Mobile Ad Formats.
Mobile display ad spending is expected to grow 180% according to eMarketer. Much of that spending will go towards mobile display banner ad units, but almost all universally agree that mobile banner ads are a legacy hangover from the web and aren’t ideal for mobile. Expect to see much more innovation in ad formats, both in standard mobile web as well as in native ads (like Facebook’s mobile news feed ads and Twitter’s promoted tweets).
 

9.  MS Tags Will Disappear. QR Codes Will Survive and Thrive.
Most people don’t know what an MS Tag is and in 2013, expect to see MS Tags follow the ranks of Betamax, 8-Track cassettes, Laser Discs and other format has-beens. QR codes will continue to grow in popularity and usage, as evidenced by their incorporation into coupon and loyalty apps like Passport and Belly and their increasing ubiquitousness on product packaging. Open standards win again.

10. More Augmented Reality and Other Mobile Activation Alternatives.
2012 was the year augmented reality burst onto the scene and there were some notable A/R campaigns last year. That being said, most A/R campaigns have been promotional and gimmicky in nature. In 2013, expect A/R to become a much more potent mobile activation format, particularly when used in conjunction with other media. And better yet, expect to see A/R become a two way format, with your actions and gestures creating interactions with the mobile content as well, as in this awesome TED video. There will also be other new mobile activation technologies that will emerge, like Netpage, which allows you to seamlessly clip and interact with magazine pages.

I do have one last prediction that I am certain will come true: mobile marketing will continue to surprise and delight us in 2013. (OK, that was a little cheesy, I admit). Nonetheless, it is true, and for all of us involved in the industry I have no doubt 2013 will be an exciting year ahead!