How to own the room with NFC marketing
Greeting cards, gift boxes, parking passes, souvenir tickets, business cards… With NFC marketing, they can now all carry and deliver personalized video messages to recruits, season ticket holders and other VIPs.
Did anyone ever really like those greeting cards that played a little song when you opened them? Certainly not the people who worked near the card aisle at stores, who had to listen to those tinny, chimey tunes all day. Probably not the people who sent them and had to awkwardly write their greeting over the lumpy surface of the card. It’s doubtful anyone who received them thought very highly of them.
Fortunately, like a lot of things, we can now take the idea of a multimedia greeting card over the finish line by shifting the important part of it to our phones. And, while we’re doing that, we can even add video.
Near Field Communication (NFC) technology can be used in marketing to make any greeting card or gift box a personalized video delivery device. Bringing your phone near the card or box will let the phone pick up the NFC signal, displaying on the phone the video embedded in the NFC tag.
NFC marketing: tap to play
Think of it as “tap to pay” – it’s the same tech – but in this case it’s “tap for a personalized video.”
NFC-enabled greeting cards or boxes are a way for sports teams to go one step further with their VIP experience, whoever their VIPs might be.
Coaches and scouts often send notes to athletes following a recruiting visit to the school. Now they can send a video with the card, like these from Hello Video. When the athlete opens the card and taps it with their phone they get a visual, face-to-face touchpoint with the coach and the team.
The team can take advantage of their alumni network for these videos. The athlete opens the card expecting a formulaic “nice to meet you, contact me with any questions, best of luck in your senior year” message. Instead, he gets a personalized video greeting (courtesy of NFC marketing) from an alumnus now playing in the NBA. “Mateo, this is the school for you like it was for me. I hope to see you on campus next year, and in the big leagues a few years after that” will go a long way to locking up a five-star recruit.
The same goes for marketing teams looking to improve the fan experience. Season ticket holders receive a box of team swag at the beginning of the season. Now the box can contain a “looking forward to sharing the season” with you message from the coach. Later in the season, the team can send a birthday card with a personalized message from the fan’s favorite player (something the team knows from their fan- and venue intelligence initiatives).
On trend
NFC-enabled paper products satisfy two trends that are increasingly in tension in the sports industry: making as many functions as possible mobile and touchless, while not neglecting the value of physical touchpoints. We see this happening already as teams and venues are offering souvenir tickets even as the actual tickets are now 100% digital.
Souvenirs tickets are, themselves, an opportunity for delivering a personalized video via NFC.
Teams may send season ticket holders or other VIPs a souvenir ticket before a game, or have it waiting for them at their suite or courtside seat.
All the creativity teams already put into their social video content can now be individualized: “You’re in the perfect place to see me hit some long-range 3’s,” a player can say to the fan sitting in the front row, mere feet from the 3-point line. For a season-ticket holder, their souvenir ticket to the first playoff game can hold a video with the players and coach thanking them for being at the home arena just as often as the players and the staff are. “We’ll see you at tip-off, Mike!” would make a big impression on a fan, sponsor or company paying a lot of money to sit where the players will actually see them.
The iot world is your oyster.
NFC technology can make any paper or plastic product a digital product. NFC applications may do more than any other consumer product to erase that line between physical and digital.
WW&L can turn just about anything into an NFC-enabled video-delivery device. Give us a call and let’s talk about how we can help you connect more strongly with your recruits, fans, sponsors or sales prospects.
But you’re on your own for making the video (although we are pretty good at that ourselves).