Times Internet has opened up the tools for creating augmented reality based marketing campaigns for its Alive app to brands and agencies with Alive Studio. Alive uses image recognition technology to scan an image and launch an appropriate action, such as playing a YouTube video or launching a website. Till now Times Group has been customising and running these campaigns for brands, but going forward it is letting agencies create campaigns themselves. Afaqs quotes Ajay Vaishnavi, director, Times Mobile as saying that the app has been used for 200 campaigns by brands associated with the group. To create a campaign using the studio, you need to select an image of 300x300 pixels and then the target image. You also need to give the campaign a name, apart from setting its start and end dates. Formats supported include audio, video, WAP page, click to capture and polls. Alive Studio also offers statistics to monitor the roll out of the campaign. Data shared includes number of scans made in an hour, platform used and the number of unique users who scanned the image. There doesn't seem to be any demographic information collected such as location, which could help brands better understand and rate a campaign. Pricing: The product is available in four tiers depending on its usage. It costs Rs 15,000 for 1,000 scans of five images, Rs 30,000 for 5,000 scans of five images, Rs 100,000 for 25,000 scans of 10 images and finally Rs 500,000 for 200,000 scans of 20 images. While the first two are…
