Together with RIM and Rogers Communications published an NFC-enabled print ad in the holiday edition of Connected Rogers Magazine.
The custom publication featured an ad for BlackBerry that asked users to touch their phone to a quarter-sized NFC chip printed on the ad. When subscribers with NFC-enabled smartphones put their phone on the chip, it prompted the phone’s browser to open to BlackBerry’s website, which offered the reader a $40 credit on RIM’s BlackBerry App World app store.
Connected used its database to target users who were BlackBerry users, delivering it to 70,000 of its 500,000 subscribers. Crosscliq chief technology officer Ian Barkley said in a large run costs can be as low as 25 cents to 30 cents per chip, but added that cost depends on the size of the run and other services provided to the client.
As demand for NFC chips rises, he expects the cost to soon go down to 15 cents to 20 cents a piece. “We’re finding new solutions now to get our chip costs down considerably more,” Barkley said. “We’re anticipating that it’s going to be a lot more common in the near future.”
Several of Crosscliq’s other magazine clients are currently interested in publishing NFC-enabled ads but Barkley said there is actually more interest from marketers in the direct mail and loyalty spaces than from publishers.
In March 2012, Wired magazine ran the first mass-produced NFC print ad in the U.S. When readers held NFC-enabled smartphones up to the ad for Lexus’s 2013 GS, a demo for the car’s Enform App Suite popped up.
Several other publications have made use of NFC, including Marie Claire, which ran an NFC-enabled ad for the healthcare charity Nuffield Health in the U.K. last November.
The holiday issue of Connected Rogers Magazine is the final print edition of the custom publication, which transitioned this month to an online-only model.
