MONETISING MOBILE: Scanbuy on why barcodes are going mainstream

UK MD David Marutiak talks scanning.

Scanbuy has 40,000 customers, its barcode-scanning technology is preloaded in more than 40 million phones, and its ScanLife app is notching up 30,000 downloads a day on app stores across all smartphones.

"Barcodes are taking off," said UK MD David Marutiak at tonight's Monetising Mobile event in London. "It's an exponential kind of rate... You're seeing 45 million people in America that have scanned a barcode. 14 million scanned in a particular month [June], and 400,000 unique products scanned a month by our ScanLife application... We're scanning somewhere north of four million scans a month."

ScanLife reads a variety of different codes: traditional barcodes, but also QR Codes, EZcodes and Datamatrix codes. Marutiak pointed out that the smaller EZcodes are growing in popularity: "If you want to put a code on the bottom of a bottle cap, you can't fit a QR Code in there," he noted.

Marutiak said analytics are vital for the growth of mobile barcodes, enabling brands and companies to track usage. He cited an example from MTV and Taco Bell, a campaign which generated 250,000 scans a month. Target's holiday catalogues were scanned 150,000 times in four weeks. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless has seen more than 450,000 scans of codes linking to Android apps in its print advertising and in-store materials.

"This number is another one-month kind of figure for this too," said Marutiak. Those were all US campaigns, but in the UK, Mitsubishi ran a five-month campaign to give away a car and saw 10,000 scans. Marks & Spencer ran another campaign and got 12,290 scans in three weeks, while Laterooms.com has seen a code scanned nearly 13,000 times in nine months to get its iPhone app.

"If this market takes off like it has in America, you're going to see exponential growth," he said. "This market is poised to take off... The number of brands that has been using barcodes has been rocketing: we're already double or triple what we were a few months ago."

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