Google Goggles has just launched an initiative with a few partners, including T-Mobile, Buick, Disney, Diageo (parent company to Guiness, Smirnoff, Captain Morgan, and other brands) and Delta Airlines. Basically, those companies are making their print ads recognizable to Google Goggles so that when someone takes a picture with the Android or iPhone app for scanning, it launches into a tailored mobile web experience.
Google Goggles has been around for a little while now, offering image recognition search through cameras on smartphones. The categories of scanable objects has expanded, from movie posters to text, to logos, art, landmarks, and more.
This partnership with some pretty big names will prove to be an interesting experiment in whether or not this kind of advertising works. QR codes have been around for awhile, and some companies are playing with them in marketing, but for many people the whole process is just a bit too cryptic. Being able to snap a picture of anything, regardless of whether it has some code burned into it, it a much more user-friendly activity. That being said, advertisers looking to tap into a mobile-savvy audience will likely be enthusiastic about partnering with Google in the near future, that is so long as this pilot project proves successful and is opened up to the world.
Here’s the demo video of the new initiative, and if you want to try it out, hit up the Android Market or iTunes App Store.
[via Google Mobile Blog]