Pinterest, a visual board of “pinnable” images, has got everyone talking—how to use it, if it’s going to last, and just why pinning recipes and dream outfits is so addicting.
While marketers and social media experts are finding new ways to bring their brand to Pinterest, Digimarc decided to go one step further, and develop the first Pinterest-enabled magazine this month using its patented digital watermark technology, as featured in the pages of Home Beautiful’s pinnable Kitchen of the Month series.
While waiting to board his flight, Digimarc’s Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing Ed Knudson took some time to chat with me about the new venture, and how he thinks it’ll affect custom publications and the content marketing space.
1. Tell me a little bit about how this “print to pin” technology works.
The general technology is a digital watermark. What we do is embed a watermark into images, text and graphics and this watermark is imperceptible to humans but not imperceptible to devices such as smartphones or iPads with higher-end cameras on them. Essentially it works like a QR code or a Microsoft tag but it’s imperceptible so you don’t mar the aesthetics of what you created with these codes.
It’s very simple to implement. There’s an application that you can download on your smartphone or there’s a white label version that can be branded for publications and then we also offer a software developers kit that can take the reading technology and embed it into existing applications. We find a lot of publications are going that way because they want to keep readers in that branded environment.
All of these magazines are very picky about aesthetics. Print is a very aesthetic medium, so not marring the aesthetics with QR codes or Microsoft tags is very important.
2. Pinterest is still fairly new, in terms of the realm of social media. What are some pros and cons to developing technology for such a new medium?
What we’ve found so far that’s proven to be difficult is the user just grasping the concept of being able to pin things from physical media. When I first started talking about the concept even the publishers didn’t quite understand when I said “We’d like to Pinterest-enable your magazine,” and you could see them hesitate. [They’d say] “What do you mean, do you mean pinning things from the digital version of the webpage? Taking a picture of my pages and pinning them?” They didn’t get it.
The biggest benefit to publishers or advertisers who take advantage of this is that when they enable readers to pin things from physical media, the same link gets connected as if they had repined from the website. So no matter how many times it gets repined throughout the Pinterest community, it still links back to the original website, the original publication.
3. How does “print to pin” extend the brand experience for readers?
Our goal is to try and keep it as simple to pin things from the physical world, magazines, retail outlets and the like, as it is to pin things from a webpage. And we think we’ve accomplished that.
Pinterest is really just a type of what we call a “post-scan experience.” In some cases you go to video or a mobile app or get additional content, but in this case we link to a publication’s Pinterest site. The user sees a watermarked image that they want to pin, they scan the image and then they’re connected to the publisher’s Pinterest site and from there they can repin the image to their pinboards. All we’re doing really is connecting the watermark image or graphic to that URL that’s created by Pinterest, whether it’s a specific image or a pinboard. [House Beautiful] did the Kitchen of the Month article in the June issue and the first image is watermarked and it says it’s Pinterest enabled. When you scan it, you’re taken to the Kitchen of the Month pinboard and there are 14 other images that the reader can then repin.
4. What’s the benefit of using this Digimarc app versus normal camera phones?
Pinterest has a great mobile app where you can take pictures and pin those pictures. There are two problems with that though, the quality of the pictures are kind of home grown, they’re not professional photography that you see in magazines, and the link goes back to whoever took the picture. There’s no established connection with the brand, so you lose out on [extending your brand].
5. Your company’s idea is an obvious merger between print and digital, a trend we’re continuing to see. Why do you think that starting with print first is important?
I’m a firm believer in print. I still believe that there’s a long, long future for print, it’s just a very immersive medium. When people sit down with a magazine, they have an emotional connection with that magazine unlike what they have with a digital experience. The data continues to show that the recall from ads that are viewed in print form as opposed to digital form are far, far higher. That’s why it’s still a $30 billion industry and still paying the bills.
A lot of our customers are now looking for companion applications. The idea that while you’re sitting there with your magazine, you always have your cell phone with you, and so why not enable readers to go in and out of the digital realm while enjoying the immersive qualities of print? They can do it on their own terms.
The thing that’s so important, especially for publications, is that we keep the reader in this branded environment. Whether it’s House Beautiful or SI or Redbook, they want to keep readers in that branded environment, so we use the companion app that’s branded by the publication and all the content associated in it is related to that print experience.
6. Is “print to pin” for every magazine? How far reaching is it?
There’s a strong overlap with the magazines we already work with such as shelter magazines, health and beauty, food—these are magazines associated with content that gets pinned a lot. The fourth category we’re seeing is entertainment, celebrities, it turns out that people pin pictures of celebrities for inspiration.
The beauty of this whole solution, we think, is that it gives the publisher ultimate control. They decide what is pinnable in their publication, if they want just one image they can link it directly to the image, or they can do an entire pinboard and post as many images as they want on that board. It’s a great opportunity for advertisers to create a pinboard associated to an ad, or if publishers want to make it available for their advertisers, they can do that, too, and extend the print buy for advertisers.
7. Any mistakes you’re seeing?
The only thing I’m seeing is the payoff that [magazines] associated with the watermark isn’t that compelling. In a couple cases they simply link off to a webpage and we try to encourage against that because it’s a bad experience for readers, they’re not mobile optimized, they’re difficult to navigate. That post-scan experience is one that’s quality and new and fresh and will continue to encourage people to scan, and Pinterest is a great example.
