Started in Japan in the mid-nineties, they were initially popular with the countries NTT DoCoMo mobile carrier, but then never quite took off until they were baked into the cameras of iOS and Android.

Recently, however, practices like contactless ordering from restaurant menus have seen QR codes become even more popular, and a clutch of companies has been trying to embed them in TV shows, too.

Flowcode is amongst them. In this video interview with Beet.TV, Flowcode chief revenue officer Jim Norton explains what is going on.

TV traction

“Brands and businesses want direct connections with their consumers and consumers want to have those direct connections directly with those brands and content providers,” says Norton, a former ad sales exec with Tribune Broadcasting, Google and AOL.

“We’ve seen a lot of traction with TV networks, publishers out of home, and then even individual brands and businesses who are looking to make the connection from, you know, some sort of physical consumer experience to digital assets that they may have.

“QR codes have become ubiquitous. As the world has moved to this contactless environment, the opportunity for brands and businesses to create an enhanced consumer experience through the universal scan on both iOS and Android devices.”

Cracking the code

Use of QR codes inside TV ads or overlaid on TV shows is one way broadcasters hope to give advertisers a method with which viewers can easily open a mobile web link for messages seen on TV.

That is a practice that has been around for several years now. But Flowcode is working hard to introduce easy-to-create code images that don’t expire, can have custom appearances and can be placed on a multitude of different destinations. It provides templates for a range of on-screen placements.

One of them is Good Morning America’s “Deals And Steals” slot, which is using Flowcodes to let viewers see product listings for featured items.

“We work with a number of local networks and sports regional sports networks as well for individual games, whether that be NBA or, or MLB,” Norton adds.”

Future flows

Norton says Flowcodes now wants to position itself as more than just a QR code enabler – rather, a provider of attribution data to advertisers.

“We’ve already seen scans from over 130 countries, all 50 states,” he says. “We’re working with tens of thousands of creators on a regular basis.

“We will continue to focus on the scale and scope of different creators. That could be a church or an individual proprietor with a small business all the way up to the largest of fortune 100 companies and everything in between

“If a brand is doing a direct mail campaign or a print campaign, and they want to test an offer or a call to action or creative, we can create unique codes that the brand or business can then look back and say ‘Okay, well, we know that 20%-off resonated at a much higher rate than free-shipping’ and, therefore, giving that publisher or client and opportunity to optimise towards the better performing messaging.”

It’s all part of the evolution not only of Condé Nast itself but also of its advertiser base, notably in the fashion and luxury space. The company’s Chief Business Officer and President of Revenue, Jim Norton, has had a bird’s eye view of that continuing transformation since his arrival 11 months ago.

As Norton explains in this interview with Beet.TV, Condé Nast Entertainment, led by producer Dawn Ostroff, now creates everything from short-form digital video to Hollywood caliber movies.

“When you think about the spectrum on which CNE operates, everything from short-form digital video all the way up to potentially award-winning feature films, it runs the gamut,” says Norton.

A 2014 story in GQ was the genesis of Last Chance U, a series that follows the East Mississippi Community College’s football team and landed on Netflix. It was just extended to a third season on the streaming video giant, as The Hollywood Reporter notes.

Next month, Sony will release CNE’s Only The Brave, which chronicles the efforts of a team of firefighters battling a wildfire in Arizona in 2013. Meanwhile, Condé Nast’s Vogue has had “great success” with the video series 73 Questions (Answered By Your Favorite Celebs), Norton says.

In video monetization, Condé Nast’s business is split about 50/50, according to Norton. There are traditional, CPM-based audience buys and “a cost-per-view buy where we’re actually creating content on behalf of brands and then going out and ensuring a certain level of distribution and traffic.”

A veteran of both AOL and Google, Norton says it’s been interesting to witness the evolution “in a very short amount of time” of such time-tested brands as Cartier, Chanel, Gucci and Prada as they’ve ventured beyond their print advertising roots.

“They’ve been very cautious about how to move into this new digital world. The first meeting you have it’s still very much print centric,” maybe with a dabble into video and digital. “Next meeting I have less than six months later, it’s a programmatic discussion.”

Along the way, the industry has gone from an open-bidded marketplace where it was “a bit of spray and pray and hope you get good impressions and good audiences” to a much more refined way in which to transact media, Norton explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

The state of the programmatic world will be explored this month at the DMEXCO advertising and media trade show on Sept. 13 and 14 in Cologne, Germany.

Norton, who is Chief Business Officer and President, Revenue at Condé Nast, has a deep background in the digital space. It includes three years at Google as National Sales Manager and nearly seven at AOL, where his last position was Global Head of Media Sales.

Much of his role at the venerable magazine publisher is figuring out the best ways to leverage the efficiency of programmatic but “still be able to deliver against the great content and audiences that Condé Nast provides.”

While traditional agencies have driven the trend toward programmatic, primarily from an efficiency standpoint, their clients have not sat by idly. Condé Nast increasingly sees individual advertisers become more educated on such aspects of the business as header bidding.

Like other publishing mainstays, Condé Nast draws a distinction between itself and digital powerhouses like Facebook and Google by stressing trusted audiences and brand-safe environments.

“What Condé Nast offers is the ability to find that efficiency from a transactional standpoint but yet still be able to, in a programmatic setting, ensure brand safety and viewability when it comes to video,” Norton says.

He cites fashion and luxury marketers as among those whose storytelling has evolved from basic print spread placements to vehicles like short films.

“What we like to think of ourselves as is rooted in quality content and brand safety through trusted journalism but the ability to be really flexible in the way those brand stories get told.”

This video is part a series that examines programmatic from both the seller and the buyer perspective. It is presented by PubMatic. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Given its significant investments in premium video to date and its plans going forward, Condé Nast is in a great place at a great time. Producers of premium video content have two big leverage points—brand safety and audience reach—with which to pry traditional broadcast dollars from advertisers.

In this interview with Beet.TV, Norton discusses rising video consumption and audience numbers that rival not just television, but programming like the NBA and primetime network shows. It represents a “real blurring of lines” between dollars that could be allocated toward broadcast versus dollars allocated toward digital.

“We’re using the same writers, producers, directors that are producing academy award nominated content,” Norton says. “What you’re going to see is us moving from a very text- and image-based company to much, much more focused on video.”

Text and imaging will still be key building blocks. In fact, a number of the feature films that Condé Nast has in production derive from stories in publications like GQ and The New Yorker.

Condé Nast does “a ton” of branded content via its 23 Stories studio, including an always on, cross-platform effort with Cadillac involving more than 50 pieces of custom content. The next step is figuring out how to take that content and “bring it to life in an experience.”

To this end, the company recently acquired an experiential agency called Pop2Life, which offers ideation and strategy, environmental design and creative services, full-service event production, talent procurement and event concierge services.

“It’s really about bridging that last mile of consumer experience. Going from the screen or printed page to an actual, physical experience,” Norton says.

Norton addresses the issue of brand safety from an overall perspective of trust in this interview with Beet.TV. He’s says it’s not just digital that’s being questioned. “Consumer trust and confidence in all of media is really at a record low. You factor in fake news, alternative facts, fraud, just overall brand safety and it’s a bit of an epidemic,” Norton says. Hence Condé Nast’s story for advertisers and agencies is about “the trust of our journalism.”

As for the bigger digital picture, Norton calls on all players to pitch in and help to shape things up. “We want to challenge brands to comply with a lot of the industry initiatives that are happening right now, number one being tag certification,” he says, citing the Trustworthy Accountability Group and Condé Nast’s certification. “Many major industry CMO’s have made it a requirement. We are asking all of our distribution partners to get certified.”

This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB’s Digital Content NewFronts 2017. The series is sponsored by the IAB. For more videos from the #NewFronts, please visit this page.

That is according to the new chair of the US branch of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

Jim Norton was elected to the post this week in the organization that represents the online advertising industry.

“This authenticated supply chain has been a real challenge in our industry, causing a proliferation of fake news and fraud,” Norton tells Beet.TV in this video interview.

“A lot of bad actors out there are profiteering from proliferation of fake news unreliable content, using social media platforms and new ad technology. How do we weed out the bad actors? We can do a much better job.”

The IAB post is Norton’s second new industry role in just a few months. In October, Condé Nast hired him from AOL to oversee revenue operations.

His plan, revealed in January, sees cost savings, titles being grouped in to “brand collections” and “client industries”, and “publishers” of magazines replaced with “chief business officers”, with the addition of “chief industry officers”, according to reports.

Norton explains to Beet.TV: “We want to leverage the heritage of our great brands … and really apply that in a very focused way to the most important marketers in the industry.

“We want to make sure our tech platform is commensurate with those (social) distribution platforms.”

IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg has previously told Beet.TV there are too many ad-tech vendors all offering the same thing.

This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.   Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange.  For more videos from this series, please visit this page. 

This video is part of series of Beet videos produced at DMEXCO, presented by FreeWheel.   For more videos from the series, please visit this page.

Norton says that while automation is bringing efficiencies to the marketplace, quality content is essential.

Last year, AOL announced its bid to simplify the landscape – and its own offering – by combining its programmatic platforms under the “One” banner.

Now company global media sales head Jim Norton tells Beet.TV in this video interview it will be “launched later in the first quarter; we’ve got a number of beta partners already”.

“Programmatic is a platform on which it’s (about reaching the) right person, (with the) right message at the right time… (and) the ability to do that in the most effective way without the technology tax that’s usually there with the various point solutions.

Norton says One is “a single platform where we’re combining everything from multi-touch attribution to a supply-side platform and working with our demand-side platform; it’s all based on data”.

He was interviewed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Beet.TV coverage of CES 2015 is sponsored by Adobe Primetime. Find all our coverage here.