I have a bit of a “love, hate” relationship with offline marketing…
The Love -
Although 95% of my time is now spent utilising online and new media marketing tactics, I do still spend a considerable amount of both time and money using offline marketing channels to help build my lead generation systems. Why?…because much of it works, BUT only if tied into a direct response campaign that drives visitors to your website.
The Hate -
I spent nearly the first 20 years of my working life in the offline marketing and advertising sector and boy oh boy, did I get fed up with it 
. Everything about the offline industry, left a very nasty taste in my mouth. From my point of view as a business owner, it was ultra expensive to operate in, needed bundles of cash to maintain, an army of employees to manage and then there was the competition, which was both insane in it’s sheer size but more importantly insane in it’s price cutting endeavours – “cutting your nose off to spite your face” – comes to mind.
And then from the advertisers (or customers) point of view, much of the time, it is incredibly expensive to use, involves large and long term commitments, is almost impossible to test and measure and of course worst of all, the chances were it never really worked.
Bring on Google Goggles to change all that!…
Google Goggles is something that Google has been playing around with for quite some time now, but it seems that now it’s slipping into second gear with some testing with 5 big names, including Disney and Delta.
So what is Goggles? Essentially, it’s a way to tie offline advertising with online advertising by using a mobile phone to take a photograph of a poster, flyer or some other form of printed media and then using Google Goggles to connect the user with an interactive online experience.
It’s very cool and I’m pretty certain that it will be the next big step for marketers and users alike.
Take a peek to see why I’m so excited…
What do you think?
Tags: google goggles, google brand experience, new google developments, google offline
Google Goggles never had the capacity to recognize people's faces. I wonder whether this will truly take off?
I liked the YouTube video…certainly a great idea on marrying the online and offline worlds together.
I Wonder What Google Goggles Will Do for the Ad Industry?
Nice article – whilst I love the idea, I do still wonder if Google Goggles will prove to be a more useful way of pointing people to relevant information. Lets wait and see.
Google Goggles, wow very cool!
Is it me or is this really space age technology? I’m with you Matt this sounds fabulous!
i enjoyed this
cool
This looks a whole lot better than the early OCR sweep days of goggles, maybe just maybe they’ve found a real use for this technology.
Let’s hope it doesn’t fall by the wayside like so many other google innovations.
I won’t hold my breath.
A friend of mine has this. it's great for finding out what something is when you have nothing more then a picture. I’m not sure why that lady was taking a picture of the Tron poster though considering the title was pretty much blazed across the front of it!?
It is very clever. I just used google goggles on my android to identify a logo on a jacket for my dad… he was mighty impressed!
Just read this on the official Google blog…
“Google Goggles works better with certain types of queries. Try taking pictures of books & DVDs, landmarks, logos, contact info, artwork, businesses, products, barcodes, or text. Currently, it's not so good when taking pictures of animals, plants, cars, furniture, or apparel.”
So does this mean this new development is all good unless your trying to market for a zoo, garden centre, car company , furniture company or clothing manufacturer!??
Image recognition is incredibly useful in many good and bad ways. That Google's version doesn't sometimes work at all or accurately is nothing. On the low res cameras being used, the laughably slow processors in the phones and the relatively low bandwidth it's working across, I think it's a miracle it works at all. It's a bit like saying that Einstein didn't fully grasp physics when he was ten and therefore showed no promise. Congrats Google team.
Sweet Post Matt
I actually was reading about that yesterday when doing research for a project about google.
Google Goggles is actually part of there “lab” functions that is in the gmail settings, there are many other tools in the “lab” that they have created as well.
I know alot of people despise Google, I however love their ingenuity!