Author: Julie Campbell

The latest report from Millennial Media has revealed that this industry is a powerful smartphone ad user.

Millennial Media has now released its most recent SMART report, which seeks to offer a deeper look at the restaurant industry, and in this edition, it has indicated that mobile marketing plays an important role among restaurants.

The report has provided considerable insight into the use of these smartphone friendly ads by these businesses.

Among the mobile marketing statistics that were provided in the report was one that indicated that 80 percent of restaurant campaigns targeting smartphone users includes a page or site that features a store locator. This is extremely notable, because when Millennial Media compared that figure to the average of all total campaigns over its platform, businesses as a whole were using that feature only 15 percent of the time.

The ad network also determined that restaurants have more searchable mobile marketing campaigns than the average.

What it found was that among the mobile marketing campaigns of restaurants, 70 percent allowed consumers to search their site from their smartphones. The average among all of the platform users, was much lower, at 24 percent.

The primary goal for restaurant mobile marketing campaigns – that is, in 80 percent of cases – was to boost foot traffic to their locations. The MM platform overall saw the same goal for their campaigns in only 9 percent of businesses.

In the first quarter of this year, the leading spending vertical was Telecom, and this experienced a year over year increase in spending by 102 percent. The next three leading verticals after Telecom were Entertainment, Finance, and Retail.

The mobile marketing and commerce report showed that when all was said and done, there were eight different verticals that experienced growth in their spending that was 100 percent or greater when compared to the same time in 2012. The leader was Sports, which saw growth in its spending by 600 percent, compared to Q1 2012.

The three leading mobile marketing campaign goals for brands and marketers, said the SMART report, were “Sustained In-Market Presence,” followed by “Driving Site/Mobile Traffic,” and finally “Driving Registrations.”

These barcodes are being increasingly used on grave markers to help say more about the individual buried beneath.

Although QR codes are found most often in mobile marketing and on product packaging to allow consumers to gain a larger amount of information about what is being sold, cemeteries have picked up on the concept and are attaching them to tombstones to turn a very limited space into a virtually limitless opportunity for sharing more about the deceased.

These smartphone friendly barcodes can be scanned through the use of any free reader app.

In the latest issue of the Online Genealogy Newsletter, Dick Eastman published a piece entitled “Genealogists have recently been finding QR Codes on tombstones.” Within it, he explained what the barcodes are and how smartphone users would be able to scan them and be redirected to a specific webpage through the browser of the device.

In the case of tombstones, QR codes can redirect visitors to a cemetery to a page about the deceased.

This feature is becoming quite popular in the cemeteries and memorials industry. Through the use of QR codes, families and friends can build a webpage that provides a great deal more information about their loved one than one or two words as well as a couple of dates and a name. In fact, it opens the opportunity to share pictures, stories, videos, and even audio recordings. It could contain a detailed biography of the person and can provide visitors to the cemetery with the chance to leave their condolences for the family.

Some QR codes also allow cemetery visitors to share their own memories with a feature that allows for photo uploads, text entry, and other types of content creation and sharing. Typically, though, these barcodes lead to a site that is entirely managed by the family of the person who has died, giving them complete control over what is posted there.

Though there were a few cemeteries that led the way with QR codes in the United States, such as a small handful in Washington state and Pennsylvania, this has rapidly expanded to the point that they are becoming quite common in many states. Moreover, they are also available in the United Kingdom and across much of Europe, as well as in China. Recently a war memorial cemetery in Wales introduced the barcodes – a launch that was celebrated with a member of the royal family in attendance.