Although advertising continues to be the only seemingly reliable model for monetizing content-centric websites, Adelson reports that click-through rates are higher than expected. That being said, typical rates for online advertising are generally abysmal, so if Digg's ads are working better than most, good for them, and let's all study their model. Read - and watch - for the rest of the story on how Digg has grown and will continue to expand and monetize.

This sort of talk would surely come as good news to Rupert Murdoch, who was referenced in the interview and has stated plans to charge search engines - and perhaps aggregators - that index and share snippets of the relevant, timely, and expensive content that traditional news outlets still struggle to integrate with modern Internet-enabled user behavior.

What about selling anonymized, aggregate user data? Adelson says he doesn't want to sell that information unless users are generally cool with the idea. "I think that users are pretty sensitive now; they're pretty savvy and they understand the idea that they have to be private." But data on trends and user attention - data that would be highly valuable for old media to have and that might actually contribute to a better user experience - might be more in line with what Digg execs are willing and able to sell.

And what about the possibility of an IPO? Hold onto your hats, day traders. Adelson says that, while he feels he owes it to investors and employees to "go public at some point," he's waiting for two factors: A valuation he likes and the day that Digg needs "hundreds of millions of dollars for something." In other words, we're not shaking the quarters out of our piggy banks just yet.

So, what is coming next for Digg? It seems the company is planning to follow in Twitter's footsteps and release international versions of the site. "About 40% of our traffic comes from international, but we have no other languages on Digg right now, so why not go there," said Adelson.

Check out the whole interview below:

From an article on AdAge, which reported on Brand in Hand's news in detail, the reason that the women were not engaging with the mobile advertisements came down to how they actually used their phones. The research showed that women, "especially so-called super-moms, are task-oriented and tend to use their smartphones to help them get things done."

In other words, these busy iPhone users didn't have time to goof off by clicking (or rather, tapping) through on a mobile ad. Ads were seen only as distractions that would take them away from the particular task at hand.

For advertisers trying to market to this particular demographic, the new findings will have an impact on what type of mobile campaigns will be run in the future. And given that only 18% of women age 18-49 have a smartphone today, according to Nielsen, smartphone advertisements just won't deliver the numbers that advertisers need. At least for now.

A Better Alternative to Mobile Ads?

Although the AdAge article didn't go into any detail about how marketers could engage smartphone-owning women in different ways, we think that there's at least one company that may have figured it out. Instead of offering distracting mobile banner ads that get in the way of the task that needs to be done, food and beverage giant Kraft introduced their own iPhone app instead.

This branded effort, dubbed "iFood Assistant" (iTunes link), is a recipe app that helps users plan meals. This fits in perfectly with how Brand in Hand claim women use their smartphones - they launch apps designed for a particular purpose. Yet this time, while doing so, the women (and men, too, we suppose) are also engaging with the brand itself because the recipes featured in the iFood Assistant app include Kraft food products of course.

This app is so successful that Kraft is even able to successfully charge for it, something that rarely works for branded apps. But Kraft's app sells - and sells well - priced at 99 cents in the iTunes App Store. They even hit their 3-year download goal in a matter of weeks, said Ed Kaczmarek, Kraft Foods director of innovation. 

While at the moment, Kraft's iPhone application appears to be the exception and not the rule when it comes to creative marketing efforts, it's a great example of how mobile marketing could and perhaps should be done, especially if you want to engage busy, task-oriented women.

For the time being, these ads are only available in the U.S. and in English, though Google plans to launch them in other regions and languages as well.

Google has obviously struggled to turn YouTube into a profitable business unit. Taking YouTube ads out of the YouTube silo could help Google to win over more advertisers and give current advertisers more reasons to buy ads on YouTube.

A Cautionary Tale

To some degree, this is really a cautionary tale, as we almost fell for this story ourselves. Only after we asked the Twitter user for screenshots did we realize that the user obviously had Power Twitter installed. This was an honest mistake all around - both by the Twitter user and by the blogger who first jumped on this story. A new ad format on Twitter, after all, would have been a great story to break.

As of now, though, the story about the ads is starting to spread on Twitter, and it will be interesting to see how far it spreads before users notice that Twitter isn't actually testing a new ad format on its profile pages.

But This Would Be a Smart Way for Twitter to Advertise

The ad format that Power Twitter chose, however, makes a lot of sense - not just for PowerTwitter but also for Twitter itself. One interesting aspect of the ads in Power Twitter, which tend to be for relatively obscure products and companies, is that the ads give you the option to forward the ad to your own Twitter stream. This format, we think, would make a lot of sense for Twitter as well.

By allowing users to essentially forward these ads to all of their Twitter followers, Twitter wouldn't have to insert them into a user's stream itself. This would also give Twitter and its advertisers a very good metric for consumer engagement. After all, if a user is willing to tweet about an ad, that's a very strong sign that the ad was relevant to the user and, by extension, also probably relevant to the user's followers.

The patent application lays claim to the methods and software "in which an indication of a telephone call being placed from a calling number is received, and a determination is made of an audio advertisement to play based on the calling number."

Essentially this looks like an expansion of the pre-existing Audio AdWords. While Google closed down its broadcast radio ad program in February, the company continues to work with advertisers on online streaming audio and radio sites. Basically Google already has a slew of pre-produced audio ads sitting in its ad serving engine. Depending on the fit of the advertiser, it may be a no-brainer for companies to throw Google Voice into their mix of marketing efforts.

If this project takes shape, the really interesting part will come a month later when advertisers are billed. With streaming audio ads, companies get a relative amount of assurance that the audience is listening to the entire ad, including the call-to-action. While audience members can always mute advertising or pull out their headphones, a site's main audio content often will not play without the obligatory intro advertisement.

Telephone ads are different. Three days after going on a date, haven't you ever been a little too eager to pick up the phone? You know nobody's advertising to cutie pie. Meanwhile, on other days it's tough to even find the phone. Many callers would have to listen to at least two 30 second advertisements before hitting the voicemail box. After the first month of the program it would be extremely interesting to see how many partial ads will be served, the cost difference between a first place and second placement ad, and even how the company deals with multiple-language advertising.

Thanks to Staska for the tip!

When a medium has been established for a long time, its ads can become a bit blah! As a Brit who moved to the US, I used to bemoan that TV ads in America were so boring compared to the ones in the UK. Part of the problem was that you could not measure the ROI of creativity. The guys who wrote the big checks could say, "Winning awards, the plaudits of your peers, and a lot of laughs is all very well, but do they drive sales?" The answer, of course, was, "Who the hell knows?"

We have seen the same thing in the Google CPC era, when the whole game was about measurement and analytics. How creative can you get with a text ad?

But when you need to entice users in social media, creativity is so critical. As we heard stories from brands such as Gillette (P&G), American Express, GE, Blackberry, and Intel, a few common themes emerged:

1. Authenticity. You cannot fake it in social media. You will get flamed and exposed, and the campaign will become counter-productive.
2. Risk-taking. You have to take a chance on a campaign. The old tried and true corporate-approved stuff will just bomb.
3. Strategy. You have to have a clear strategy. What problem are you solving, and what big lever are you using to hit that goal?

The Gillette India Story

There were so many great stories, but this one resonated the most. Imagine selling razor blades in a country with a billion plus people and where your blades cost ten times those of the local competition. Gillette's sales had been flat for a decade. After this one particular campaign, its sales grew by 40%. That is massive. The thing to note is that it spent a lot of money on traditional media but used that to spark a debate (about the value of shaving for your sex appeal and career prospects) that was amplified in social media.

Feeling Like the Web 1.0 of 1995

Big money is starting to move into social media. There is recognition that the old ways of selling online -- what some people are calling "tradigital" -- is not working as well anymore. But it is still very experimental. The numbers don't reflect it yet. But many smart and creative people are working out new ways to engage consumers. Some of the resulting campaigns will be dismal, embarrassing failures: this is a high-risk game. But doing nothing would be worse and would leave room for smart competitors to steal market share.

How to Play This If You Are a Web Tech Venture

The overriding message to people who sell tech solutions or websites to advertisers and marketers was that there is no silver bullet. This is the era of the "mashup campaign," using a lot of tools and informed by an overarching strategy. So, if you sell one of those tools, make sure you play nicely in the eco-system. Be a good mixer: open APIs and the rest of it.

Generally, this works surprisingly well, and the ability to set your location often gives you good local results. At the same time, however, some searches that worked perfectly well on the main Bing site only gave horrificly bad results on the mobile site. A search for "Portland to Newark," for example, will give you results from Farecast on the main Bing site. The mobile version brought up a list of local businesses with the word 'Portland' in their name around Newark, NJ. Of course, Bing only launched a few days ago, so we expect Microsoft to fine-tune these results over time.

For the last few days, I've had Bing as my default search engine in Firefox. After using it for a while, and after adding a few Greasemonkey scripts to enhance its functionality, Bing has really shown that it is a very useful search engine. It is very hard to break the Google habit, however, and if I hadn't set Bing as the default search, I would have probably been heading over to Google instead.

New Ads

In addition to the mobile version of Bing, Microsoft also launched its new advertising campaign for the new search engine, which prominently features Microsoft's core message about Bing: it's not about finding lots of links, but about getting you the right information quickly. The ad is definitely a cut above Microsoft's Seinfeld ads from last year, though it will probably not unleash the kind of visceral reaction that a lot of people had to the Laptop Hunters ads. There, of course, Microsoft had a relatively easy target (Apple) - but it would really be hard to construct an ad that attacks Google's search prowess.

The proposed new meta tag would look something like this:

<meta name="advertising" content="ask" />

According to the proposal, a pop-up window would appear at the top of the page when a user navigates to a site that implements this tag.

Ads Are Getting More Intrusive Again

It is no secret, of course, that most readers do not necessarily like ads - and while we have thankfully moved away from pop-up and pop-under ads on every single site (remember those?), the latest crop of new ads is getting increasingly invasive again. Just yesterday, the New York Times front page was taken over by a giant ad from chip maker Intel, which covered the text of the front page completely. And the new ad standards (including ads that remain in the page even when a user scrolls up or down) from the Online Publisher Association also call for bigger and more intrusive ads.

Of course, advertisers and publishers have to walk a fine line, where the ads still pay for the content without annoying readers so much that services like AdBlock Plus become a default tool for everybody.

Taking the AdBlock Plus proposal even further, maybe advertisers and site owners could set different 'noise levels' as well, so that users could automatically block ads that expand, make noise, or feature dancing aliens, but keep static display ads and text ads.

Do Publishers Have an Option?

While content providers have experimented with micropayments in the past, these experiments have generally failed, so at least for the time being, advertising is the most effective way for publishers (including ReadWriteWeb) to monetize their efforts. Content producers and advertisers are obviously aware of products like AdBlock Plus, and as the comments on the AdBlock Plus blog post clearly show, there is a large contingent of users who are adamantly against all forms of advertising on the web. These users will surely continue to block all ads on every site, but the AdBlock Plus proposal would make it easier for other users to control where they see ads.

What do You Think?

Here at ReadWriteWeb, our advertisers obviously don't just keep our servers up and running, but they also keep all of us out of trouble, off the street, and gainfully employed, so we hope that you will decide to unblock ads on RWW and all the other sites that don't feature intrusive ads; but feel free to let us know what you think about the state of online advertising and the AdBlock Plus proposal in the comments.

Of course, there are thousands of commercial videos on YouTube where producers did not ask for written consent from the company before posting these videos, and, according to Mediaweek, YouTube has only contacted a very small number of these though the service is clearly trying to signal that it is not happy with the current situation. While YouTube is only notifying a small number of content owners, some producers complain that YouTube will not promote their videos if they include product placements.

YouTube, which dominates the online video market, is one of the most important outlets for most content producers, and YouTube has every interest in keeping its most prolific talent on the service. At the same time, though, YouTube is also bleeding a good amount of money every single day.

According to Mediaweek, YouTube will soon announce a more formal process for integrating commercial videos that integrates their own ads and product placements.

AdMob will allocate ad impressions based on the quantity and quality of the inventory that each member contributes.

Given that developers have relatively few outlets to promote their applications outside of Apple's App Store, this looks like a good way for developers to get the word about their applications out to users. Given that the ads appear in other apps, the targeted users are obviously already interested in downloading iPhone apps.

The post informed advertisers that they now had access to two of the most frequently requested targeting filters: language targeting and location targeting. Obviously, the language targeting makes sense, especially considering that Facebook is currently available in 40 languages with over 60 more in development. In fact, it's somewhat surprising that this feature was not available until now.

When a particular language is entered into a box on the ad signup form, the approximate reach of the selection will appear at the bottom. For example, if an advertiser enters in a location of "United States" and the language "Spanish," the approximate reach will display 1,081,820 - the number of Spanish-speaking Facebook users in the States.

Facebook Knows Where You Live

However, it's the location-based targeting which is the most interesting of the two updates. Here, advertisers can narrow their focus in order to target users within a certain mile radius of a particular location. This feature is currently available only in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada for targeting cities and/or targeting within 10, 25, or 50 miles of the cities selected.

With this feature, advertisers can tap into the detailed demographics that Facebook users so willingly share along with their age, sex, relationship status, educational background, etc. (You didn't really think you were just filling that info out to share with friends, did you?)

Will Hyperlocal Ads Come Next?

As advertisers better learn to target narrower sets of users, we wonder if it's only a matter of time before Facebook introduces a mobile, location-based component to their network which would allow users share their exact (or nearly exact) location within a city. Imagine the possibilities for extreme hyperlocal ads then! What if advertisers could target all the users who updated how they were sipping lattes at Starbucks, for instance? Or perhaps the ads could target users who posted that they've checked in at a Vegas hotel for a big conference? These are the sorts of niche demographics that advertisers can only dream about now, but the technology already exists to enable that level of precision.

Today, a handful of early-adopters are currently sharing this type of information through Facebook's News Feed and status updates courtesy of the mobile social networking service Brightkite. If you're friends with any Brightkite users, you'll likely see the location updates pop into your feeds from time to time thanks to that service's ability to integrate with Facebook by way of Facebook Connect. This relatively new authentication technology allows users to log into the Brightkite service with their Facebook account and then shoot their updates from Brightkite back into their profiles. If Facebook advertisers could tap into the sort of niche demographics that Brightkite could give access to, it could open up a whole world of possibilities for hyperlocal ad targeting.

The only stumbling block to implementing this type of targeting is the same one that always comes up: those pesky users and their sense of privacy. Would Facebook users revolt if, all of a sudden, Facebook knew exactly where they were and served up ads that did too? The Facebook ads seem creepy enough now as they're often far more accurate and relevant than some users are comfortable with. What would hyperlocal ads look like then? Far creepier, we would imagine. "Do you really need that second Frappuccino? Why not head to the gym instead - it's only 3 blocks away!" Yikes.

But while it's true that some users would balk at that level of invasiveness, others would welcome it. In fact, Facebook is actively cultivating a sense among its users that going online is no longer a private activity. By tucking away their privacy controls deep within their settings, they're encouraging the average user to overshare personal information with people who would have never known them in that way before - people like mom, dad, and the boss, for example.

In time, the sense of openness Facebook fosters among a person's social - and perhaps professional - network will wear away at that sense of privacy until users aren't just tolerant of these hyperlocal ads, they will welcome them and they'll expect them. Google's recent foray into more targeted advertising will only help further this cause, too.

Of course, in this imagined scenario, Facebook users who want to maintain their privacy would be able to do so - they could just opt-out of the feature. But maintaining online privacy is something that will, over time, become harder and harder to do. There will be more settings to adjust, more configuring of block lists, and more checkboxes to mark. Most users won't bother with it - they will just adjust to the changes and to the new reality of the smarter (and yes, perhaps scarier) ads.

Now Google's deep dive into U.S. TV viewing habits will go even further. In a partnership with Dish Network, also a TV Ads partner since the launch, Google will be able to give their customers data involving which programs are time-shifted versus which are not. The time-shifted viewership data breaks the TV ad impressions down into "live," "live + same day," "live + 1 day," "live + 3 day," and "live + 7 day" categories. This additional data will be provided free of charge to advertisers.

Unlike with Nielsen, who samples a small, opt-in portion of the TV-watching American population, Google's DVR data comes from EchoStar's Dish Network. The data is "anonymized," of course, but it's entirely possible that most Dish customers don't know they're providing data to Google at all. The metrics reported reflect viewership of the specific TV ad commercials, says Google, not just general program viewership. That can only mean that Dish is providing Google with details on who fast forwards through the commercials versus who does not.

Google isn't just handing over the data they're retrieving from the DVRs, either. They are actively analyzing it, too. According to the company's blog post, they "love digging into data" and have been "excited to investigate how time-shifted viewing differs from live viewing." Their initial findings suggest that niche programming tends to get a disproportionate percentage of its viewing through DVR.

At the moment, Google TV Ads are sold on the Dish Network for some of NBC Universal's cable channels, Bloomberg, and the Hallmark Channel. Dish Network is the U.S.'s third largest pay-TV provider.

The main conclusion the report draws is that advertisers can reach iPhone users with mobile campaigns more easily than with other platforms.

Some other interesting findings from the study include the following (see below).

Seeing Ads

• One in ten mobile phone users in the U.S. used a location-based service such as a map, friend or restaurant finder in Q4, 2008. The 25 - 34 age group saw the highest levels of interest in this type of offering, with 22 percent penetration. 
• One in seven mobile phone users visit a mobile Web site, the second most popular response; this rises to one in five for iPhone users

Recalling Ads

• iPhone users are four times as likely to recall LBS (location-based service) ads as non-iPhone users.
• 33 percent of mobile consumers recall seeing mobile advertisements this quarter, compared to 41 percent of iPhone users.
• One in three consumers that recall seeing a mobile ad responded in some way; this rises to one in two for iPhone users
• While men and women are equally likely to recall mobile advertising, women are 85 percent more likely to respond to ads than men

Responding to Ads

• Calling a toll free phone number published in the ads is the most common means of response; iPhone users called twice as much as non-iPhone users
• One in seven consumers reported buying a product or visiting a store as a result of seeing a mobile advertisement; for iPhone users, more than one in four bought something as a result of seeing an ad

Exposure or Conditioning?

For the most part, this report comes to the sorts of conclusions we already knew - although we didn't have the numbers to back up our gut feelings. iPhone owners are going to see more ads because the use their phone to do more stuff. They surf the web, launch applications, play games, check their email, text their friends, and more. With the amount of time they spend engaged with their device, as opposed to someone who has a Razr for example, it's only natural to think that they will come across more ads.

What is interesting about these findings, though, is the recall rate for these ads when comparing iPhone users with others. Although it would have been a much more interesting survey had they compared iPhone owners just to those who owned other smartphones, it's still interesting to see how engaged they are with the mobile advertising they are subjected to . Among those that remember seeing an ad, half of iPhone users responded compared to one out of three mobile phone users. Why is that?

Could it be that the ads presented on the iPhone are simply more interesting and relevant than those displayed on other mobile devices? If we're talking about in-game and in-app ads only, that's entirely possible - especially if the ad is for another application! Or could it be that iPhone owners are, as mocoNews puts it, "a self-selected group that responds to marketing hype?" Yikes.

If we had to bet, we would imagine that it simply comes down to a numbers game. iPhone users use their phones more, see more ads, so therefore they will both recall and respond to more ads than anyone else.

A group of Stanford University researchers specializing in artificial intelligence, Saxena and Siddharth Batra, and Assistant Professor Andrew Ng, created this new technology they're calling ZunaVision. The embedding technology is driven by an algorithm that first analyzes the video while paying close attention to the section of the scene where the image or video will be embedded. It then subtly alters the color, texture, and lighting of the embedded object to better fit it in with the surroundings. As other objects pass in front of the embed, it disappears from view and as the camera pans and zooms, the algorithm shape-shifts the object accordingly. The appropriate shadows are also added for a more realistic feel. The end result is an embed that looks as if it was there all along, instead of being some obvious insert or overlay that is clearly not a part of the scene.

This type of technology is nothing new to the big Hollywood studios - they've been using similar methods for years in order to do special effects. Until now, however, there hasn't been a way for people to perform these kinds of advanced video edits without investing serious money into professional video editing software. But with ZunaVision , anyone and everyone can accomplish this same task in minutes, with only a click of the mouse.

Revolutionizing Video Ads?

Videographers are already thinking of creative and imaginative ways to use this technology to liven up their videos and amateur films, but the real financial potential of ZunaVision lies in advertising. With ZunaVision, anyone with a video camera could potentially earn money by agreeing to place corporate logos or ads within their videos before uploading them to the internet. That could be a hugely successful venture if the technology was adopted by Google, for example, to become the "AdSense for Video" and integrated with their video-sharing site YouTube.

At the moment, YouTube is experimenting with different methods of monetization, including overlay ads on embeds, post-roll ads, and allowing publishers to bid for sponsored placement of their videos on the site. These methodologies are still too new to provide any conclusive data as to their success just yet. ZunaVision seems to be just as promising, if not more so, than any of these current experiments.

The ZunaVision site features several example of these in-video embeds, which you can see here - there are well over a hundred examples of both user-gen videos and clips from TV and film that demonstrate the technology's potential.

You can sign up and try ZunaVision for yourself by clicking here.

In "The Scannable World: Mobile Phones As Barcode Scanners," we introduced the concept of using your phone to scan barcoded objects in the real world. We also touched on some of the history surrounding this technology. One of the issues with barcoded ads today is where you find them: newspapers, arguably a dying medium whose subscriber base isn't necessarily composed of cutting-edge early adopters. So how can barcodes make their way to the people who actually use the web and other modern technologies? One company thinks they have the answer.

Neomedia is ready for the barcode trend to take off. They've been around for a decade and have had the technology for reading barcodes with mobile phones in place for years. Now, thanks to the ubiquity of modern mobile phones, they are poised for success if this trend ever takes off. Their barcode scanning software lets you access mobile web content by scanning ads from print, packaging, billboards, and even broadcast media.

The Printed Out Web

No matter how tech savvy you are, there are still times when you simply must print out something from the web. Driving directions are a great example. Now imagine that your printout looked something like this (see below) - directions at the top with a scannable ad for a hotel at the bottom of the page:

That printout isn't a prototype, but a real ad available today from RandMcNally.com. The ad is made possible through NeoMedia's partnership with Format Dynamics, a company that works with web publishers and advertisers to help transform web pages into readable printouts which can then be monetized with ads. The company's "Clean Print" technology is a real-time dynamic reformatting engine that harvests a page's content and then produces a printed page in a coherent format without odd line breaks, cut off images, etc. Clean Print will also work no matter how the end user decides to print - whether "Ctrl + P" is pressed or a print button is used, the results are the same.

Any site using Clean Print technology can now include barcoded ads alongside their content. This is great for driving directions, but also for articles that tend to be printed out and shared, such as those from online news sites. (Don't believe it? Just look at the uproar over the RWW print button, for example). Below is an example of what that looks like. The article is from The Orange County Register's site and the ad is for Crocs footwear.

Since the partnership between NeoMedia and Format Dynamics is still brand new, there aren't many other examples just yet. But Format Dynamics is already serving ads and reformatting the printed web pages of approximately 80 web publishers, including Rand McNally, CareerBuilder, the San Jose Mercury News, the Denver Post, the Houston Chronicle, and a few others. In time, NeoMedia will extend their barcode offering to more of these clients.

How To Scan: NeoMedia's NeoReader

NeoReader is the barcode scanning software. It's not a separate piece of hardware, but software that runs on your phone. NeoReader currently works on iPhone, Java, Symbian, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile. The only missing platform is Android, but the company plans to include that at a later time. Even without Android, the company has managed to cover most of the smartphone market as well as many of today's standard phones via their Java offering. (You can see a full manufacturer's list here).

To download the application, just go to get.neoreader.com from your handset's web browser and follow the instructions. If your handset is not supported, you can still access the NeoReader program. Just bookmark the URL get.neoreader.com/go. This web page will let you enter keywords and barcodes in order to access the same content available to users of the mobile application. iPhone users can simply download the NeoReader application from the iTunes App Store.

Android has been announced but it isn't actually out yet, so we can't compare NeoReader to Android's barcode scanning apps like CompareEverywhere or GoCart. On the iPhone, though, NeoReader is not the only barcode reading app currently available - there are several to choose from. In function and feature set, the difference between most of those apps and NeoReader is minimal. Like many of those other iPhone apps, NeoReader also lets you build your own barcode if you so desire. You can create a barcode for any URL just by going to http://www.neoreader.com/code.html and entering in the URL you want to convert.

Make a Barcode:

The real difference between NeoReader simply comes down to the fact that NeoMedia is a business that's trying to make barcode scanning a reality...it's not an app put out by an independent developer. NeoReader already has a handful of sites where it can be used and over the coming weeks they will be able to add to their list as their partnership with Format Dynamics deepens.

Is This The Answer?

With the rising popularity of camera phones, smartphones, and better web browsers for surfing the "real" internet at higher 3G speeds, there's an improved chance for a technology like barcoded ads to take off. However, for it to really become truly successful a lot of advertisers and big-name companies will have to get on board and consistently offer barcoded ads for an extended period of time - not just try it once and then give up, claiming them a failure. In today's uncertain economy, the number of advertisers willing to take this chance may be low.

NeoMedia's partnership with Format Dynamics means they are able to offer a good selection of web sites where you can find the technology in use. That's a good start at least, but ultimately the technology will come down to consumers' willingness to interact with the real world in this virtual manner. The expectation behind this whole barcoded ad platform is that people will see the advertisement and then take an extra step to learn more about the product or service. Is that even how today's consumers interact with ads? In our media-saturated culture, most consumers run from ads, not the other way around.

Will adding barcodes make viewing ads a more engaging experience or will consumers continue to ignore ads like they do today? That's a hard question to answer with a technology so new and untested, but it's possible that, if done well, barcode scanning could work. The trick may be to provide an added value to the customer who takes the time to scan. That added value could be a discount, a free gift with purchase, or something else of a compelling nature to the potential customer. That could make barcode scanning the coupon clipping of the 21st century...and that might actually work. Scan to save. We would do it. Would you?

See also: The Scannable World, Part 1: Mobile Phones As Barcode Scanners
The Scannable World, Part 3: Barcode Scanning In The Real World