Since 2008 Posterscope have been lucky enough to have had a Near Field Communications enabled mobile phone and a selection of posters with NFC chips embedded in them.  This technology allows the user to do three things:

1) access content : touch the phone against a spot on the poster to immediately trigger the viewing or downloading of a piece of content from the web.

2) share : touch the phone against another NFC phone to share the above content.

3) pay : touch the phone on the poster to purchase the advertised product with the phone acting in the same way as today’s contactless payment cards.

In our tests the concept proved remarkably robust and we’ve been suggesting ever since that this will help create a very exciting future for the out-of-home medium.  Over the last few weeks a couple of significant developments have made this more of a reality :

• Nokia are issuing a software upgrade to their C7 phone to activate the NFC technology inside.
• Google’s Nexus S handset supports NFC as does the latest Android software upgrade.
• The ‘Recommended by Google’ stickers for placement in the windows of business premises have NFC chips integrated into them.

So we now have publicly available NFC phones and NFC enabled posters out on the streets.  Admittedly the latter is only for businesses in the test town of Portland, Oregon, USA but these poster chips are cheap and widely available.  As such NFC OOH ad campaigns will start to be seen outside of Japan where the technology is already prolific.