Case Studies | Marketing | Brand Journalism
Last month I was in Bangkok delivering a talk at the Spark Conference.
During the startup panel discussion at the end of the day, there was a short discussion of “stickers.” Panelists were enthusiastic about the potential for early stage sticker companies to do well. This was a completely new category of technology so I wanted to learn more.
A digital photo “sticker” is sort of like a watermark that goes onto a photo. I’ve seen these on photos many times. For example HubSpot put a “HubSpotting Around the World” sticker in the corner of my Antarctica polar plunge photo (see the end of the post for the photo - that’s a HubSpot logo hat in my hand) and then shared it along with other photos that people had shot around the world. The HubSpotting Around the World sticker brands the photos in the series.
My favorite of the apps discussed in Bangkok is Sticgo, a location-based, real time photo sticker app. It is currently only available in Thailand but I expect it will catch on globally.
Sticgo is sort of like Instagram (because you share photos) but also like Foursquare (because you collect a sticker for your photo when you check-in at a location that has stickers).
The two app images here illustrates how Sticgo works. The Sticgo Facebook page has a bunch of examples of how the app is used.
Other companies in the space include PicoCandy, a company licensing well-known characters for stickers (I’m imaging putting Bart Simpson on a pic). And Quan that is doing a sort of emoticon approach to adding stickers to photos.
I tried to find other examples of sticker companies located in North America and Europe, but there were too many false hits in the Google results. The app store in iTunes has some apps so maybe there’s more going on. Does anyone know other examples?
Digital photo stickers as content marketing
I see big potential here for content marketers. Here are a few ideas. Maybe you have some too.
Conferences and events could have a custom sticker so when people snap a pic at the conference, they can add the sticker and brand the image as being from that event.
Weddings, graduations, birthday parties and the like can sticker up the resulting photos.
At rock concerts, most of the audience is snapping pics anyway, so why not get rid of the “no photography” signs and allow photos. Bands could encourage people to add a custom sticker with the artist, date, and venue: “David Byrne & St. Vincent, Orpheum Theater, September 24, 2013” (great show BTW).
Any other ideas?
