'Context is king, content is queen': Blippar CEO Ambarish Mitra at Mobile World Congress 2015

Blippar CEO and founder Ambarish Mitra travelled to Spain for ‘Mobile World Congress 2015: The Edge of Innovation’, taking the Barcelona stage for the 4^th year in a row to explain how mobile phone cameras are increasingly acting as our eyes, how a brand’s products are now their most powerful media platform, and about the growing importance of giving consumers personalised, contextual content.

Explaining Blippar’s augmented reality platform, Mitra said: ‘Augmented reality is connected to the physical world and to what you see with your eyes. For us, context is everything: what human beings see with their eyes increasingly sets the context for us.’

Ambarish on stage at Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona this week

He went on to discuss the global shift in how people see their mobiles, and how they now expect to be able to use them: as tools for extracting information about every single thing they see, 24 hours a day.

‘We are increasingly seeing a phone’s camera acting as our eyes - in fact, as the most used part of our mobile devices; we point it at everything. Tremendous trends in Instagram and Snapchat prove visual communication is becoming a core part of our digital daily lives; we almost lead digital lives.

‘But digital is not everything. The physical world completely surrounds us and gives us so much access to things that we need to respond to it - that’s why context is everything.’

The Edge of Innovation panel at Mobile World Congress

Using Blippar campaigns created for Pepsi, Nescafe and Turkish dairy giant Ulker as examples, Mitra explained how Blippar offers consumers contextual mobile content directly off a brand’s product.

‘To blipp is to hold your phone up to something and use the camera to extract digital information about it that depends on who you are and where you are. And that is the core of context.

‘At Blippar we are increasingly driving the awareness for brands that product is your new media. People often forget that there are more products serving the world every day than Google searches on and tweets combined. Trillions of them. The idea with Blippar is that people can have access to information about everything they’re looking at instantly.’

A tweet of Ambarish's MWC15 quote about context... and elephants

During several Blippar demos, Mitra explained that Blippar’s technology can determine whether users are blipping products in-store or out of store, adapting the blipp content provided accordingly.

‘People truly think about brands when they’re about to consume something or about to buy it, and at that point brands connect their user straight to the core of the product. So context is king, content is queen and distribution… is a bit like an elephant.’

Speaking about this new visual browsing behaviour Blippar is championing, he said: ‘Visual search is here to stay. It’s a completely new thing. One of the biggest weaknesses we have as human species are our own eyes; our imagination is way bigger.

‘When we’re out and about so many points of inspiration make us curious but we cannot use our words to describe them. So I predict that in five years there will be two very dominant behaviours: one when you know exactly what red dress you want to research and you use a traditional search engine, and the second for when you want to know more about that red dress, and you just point your phone at it to learn more. For us, that’s the definition of context.’