BMW’s “Car Of Tomorrow”: NFC Print Ads
The global automobile leader, BMW, has leveraged NFC-based print ads in order to promote their car range innovatively in Europe. The automobile company teamed up with a London based startup to implement proximity marketing. BMW leveraged an NFC chipset in Spiegel Wissen’s copies, a spin-off of European current affairs publication Der Spiegel.
What Is BMW’s “Car Of Tomorrow” Advertorial?
“Car of Tomorrow” (“Spiegel Wissen: Das Auto Von Morgen”) was a four-page advertorial leveraged by BMW in Europe implemented with near-field communication (NFC) tags. Tamoco, a startup from London, partnered with BMW to implement the NFC chip inside the magazine. These NFC printed ads allowed the users to tap their smartphone on the ad, which allowed the users to directly download the official “BMW i” app on their device.
Users can further tap the device on the printed ad for i3 and i8 advert after installation of the app, which would lead them to the content that they are interested in. Tamoco provided the means of electrical hardware as well as a cloud-based software platform that allowed users with the related content. Using Tamoco’s cloud platform, customers would be directed to the right content based on how often they have tapped the ad previously. On the other hand, BMW could collect and analyse the user’s data and responses.
While the campaign was the first of its kind, the campaign was planned very strategically with the help of industry-led research cooperations.
Campaign Outline And Advantages:
BMW has implemented many such innovative ad campaigns on a larger scale. However, their NFC based ad campaigns created value by providing personalised customer engagement. NFC and similar proximity marketing allowed the carmaker to speed up the personalised customer experience as per the user’s interests right on their phone.
As per Tamoco, their proximity technology primarily allows the marketer with real-time analytics based on which brands can analyse the user’s patterns and sales history. This information, along with other data taken from social media, can provide even fruitful insights into their audience to improve the customer experience.
Plus the cost associated with such a campaign was viable for the German carmaker allowing them to experiment with this strategy as a side marketing strategy. It allowed the perfect merging between online and offline campaigns to crucially cut costs and deliver value to publishers as well as brands considering the drop in print advertising revenue.
Conclusion: The Future Of Connected Marketing
Like BMW, many other automobile companies had also leveraged the “Internet of Things” and digital marketing trend to create a new brand identity and connect with their customers. Since then, the automobile sector has allowed many technological implementations, including the improvisations for in-car experience for smartphone owners. All these engagements and data allow the brands with significant value in terms of identifying how people respond to these campaigns and whether they are proposing the right product to the appropriate audience. At the same time, it was a groundbreaking outcome for the next generation printed ads resulting in significant digital advertising revenue returns.
