Contributed by John Burke
Google Googles says hola to brands. NYT is reporting:
In the early days of smartphones, users could find out about a movie by entering its title in Google’s browser and searching. Then Google introduced the ability to use voice to make a query. Now, the Google Goggles visual search app, available in iPhones and Android phones, allows users to take photos of an object, say a movie poster, and find out more about it in search results.
Google hopes the experiment will give it insight into how consumers want to interact with a brand. “It’s a learning experiment for us more than an opportunity to make money,” said Michael Slinger, Google’s head of mobile search advertising sales in North America. “We’ve got the distribution and interesting visuals. Everything hinges on whether the users will adopt this or not.” Google has reason to believe it just might pay off. The company says mobile searches on Google have grown 500 percent in the last two years, and Google Goggles has been downloaded more than 250,000 times as a standalone application. The app was also recently integrated into the Google iPhone app. While the technology is not new, the idea that brands can begin to play with it is. Google announced its intention to use the Goggles app as part of its mobile advertising strategy at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Mixx conference in New York in September. So while a visual search for a Frida Kahlo painting might show search results like a Wikipedia page about the artist, brands that are taking part in the Goggles experiment — Buick, Walt Disney, Diageo, T-Mobile and Delta Air Lines can point users to a branded web site for cellphones or other content they select. After yesterday's news on what StickyBits is doing it's clear there is movement happening with scan/capture call to action's monetizing the gap between the device and the brand. You've been warned.
Contributed by John Burke
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