My next briefing was with Jeri Owen, VP of Marketing at DigiMarc, which licences technology building blocks to its partners. One of these, Spanish firm aquaMobile, is a member of the Digital Watermarking Alliance, which also counts Philips, Thomson and research firm Nielsen, among its members.
aquaMobile creates digital watermarks for printed content. A digital watermark is invisible to the naked eye, but enables a machine, or a phone, to interact with the content, so its basically a QR Code that you cant see.
Owen says that digital watermarks are preferable to QR Codes from an aesthetic point of view, because they are either invisible, or if you do need to have a symbol to tell people that the content is interactable with, it can be whatever you choose. Aquamobile uses a small camera icon, but it could just as well be the brand's logo. The DWA, in fact, has produced a Whitepaper comparing and contrasting barcode and digital watermarking technologies, which we hope to reproduce in the not-too-distant future.
But while digital watermarking is undoubtedly clever, it seems me that its one more standard, and one more application, that you need on your mobile in order to engage with this stuff. The day that digital watermarks, QR Codes, barcodes and all the other various bits of technology that enable you to initiate a digital interaction with a brand by pointing your phone at its marketing collateral come together in one unified standard will be a happy one. It will also, no doubt, encourage more brands to use whatever technology it is that wins out. Be honest, have you seen many campaigns using a QR Code lately? No, me neither.