Analysis of an interactive mobile marketing campaign conducted for HotelTonight, a travel app for last-minute hotel deals, has found that only a small number of people used the NFC option but nonetheless there is cause for optimism as more NFC handsets become available.

The campaign was delivered by Blue Bite, out-of-home digital advertising network RMG Networks and mobile advertising solutions provider Amobee and used RMG’s network of digital screens equipped with Blue Bite mTag interaction points. The screens were located in airports and city centre cafés in major US cities including Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia and San Francisco.

The campaign combined a 30-second promotional video for HotelTonight with the ability for interested consumers to download the travel app. Those with an NFC phone could tap their NFC handsets on a Blue Bite mTag to download the HotelTonight app. Consumers without NFC on their mobile phones were also able to download the app using a QR Code, Bluetooth or WiFi.

The campaign ran for six weeks and, overall, HotelTonight achieved more than 15,000 “unique mobile engagements” with more than 50% of those who interacted with Blue Bite’s mTag platform going on to download the app.

“Without question, we saw a majority of our unique engagements primarily coming from our other platforms (Bluetooth, WiFi, QR Codes) as NFC was the minority,” Dan Trigub, Blue Bite’s VP of business development, told NFC World. “We saw on average one to two NFC engagements per location per week across the entire campaign.

“However, this absolutely makes sense given there are only five or so phones in the US right now that support NFC versus, as an example, just about 95% of all phones that have Bluetooth,” he added. “That said, we are encouraged by the NFC results as we are certainly in the early stages of its penetration into the consumer market as the potential for growth is tremendous.

“In addition, when you extrapolate our results across all the locations and cities the NFC results are compelling – our platform is all about a network approach. If we only got these NFC results in one or two locations it is not that exciting, but when extrapolated across all our US locations it gets very promising.

“We are certainly strong believers and advocates of NFC and think it has the potential of being that ‘silver bullet’ when it comes to mobile content delivery. We are just still early in the US and in the meantime believe it is critical to utilize a combination of technologies to get the broadest reach possible for marketers and brands.”

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