Bringing stories to life right off the page: When Blippar met Egmont

There's nothing we at Blippar love more than showing people our technology for the first time. Seeing the magic in action makes mouths form giant Os and eyes sparkle like the Oxford Street Christmas lights.

Oh, wait, we lied. There is one thing we love more: showing our technology to a whole roomful of people, and then informing those people that they can use it themselves to empower their own business.

Which is exactly what happened when Blippar’s Head of Media Simon Mukerjee travelled to Sweden to speak to leading Nordic media group Egmont about turning their print output interactive as a means of making return on investment (ROI) skyrocket.

Egmont’s mantra is ‘we bring stories to life’. How apt, therefore, that when it comes to the publishing industry Blippar’s is ‘we bring print to life’. A perfect print partnership.

Blippar is already empowering Egmont’s UK branch, enabling them to turn their children’s and teen magazines interactive using our DIY platform Blippbuilder, so enlightening their Scandinavian hub about our ambitious goal (making the whole world blippable) was a natural next step.

Simon led two ‘Digital Days’ sessions with Egmont staff, explaining that while publishers are under mounting pressure to keep print afloat in an increasingly digital world, print’s financial returns are still incomparably higher to anything yet achieved by digital.

The fact is, consumers still prefer print: 50% of US print readers would abandon a title if it were available only online, yet 60% of print readers would also like access to digital content.

The answer? Combine the two.

Using Blippar you can now offer your print readers exclusive digital content, accessed by blipping your interactive pages with smartphones, tablets or wearables via the Blippar app.

This mobile content could include 3D animations, additional photo galleries, exclusive video footage, music, sneak previews of new books or films, click-to-buy links, free samples and coupons, mobile games, opinion polls, sweepstake entry and much, much more.

Offering examples of publishers already embracing interactive print via Blippar – Immediate Media, Shortlist and, most recently, Conde Nast in VOGUE Germany – plus details of our high-profile commercial clients keen to advertise in interactive publications - Simon excited Egmont with Blippar’s vision of becoming the next generation visual browser.

But it was the promise of offering, for the first time, tangible data on reader behaviour that really pricked up some 200 ears.

Blippar enables publishers first to ‘pull’ readers further into editorial, advertorial and advertising, and then to track precisely - via your personal metrics dashboard - which readers are interacting with which pages, when, how, where, and for how long. It’s an extraordinarily powerful proposition, and one enabling media groups to genuinely understand and even drive ROI, adapting blipps to suit each audience.

And if you don’t believe us, just give Vogue a call….