What is Stopping Brands from Going Big with NFC? | SharpEnd's Cameron Worth

and so what we really did is we were quite responsible for bringing Brands and marketers into the kind of iot ecosystem so if you look at you know fast forward to seven years now we've got a bunch of the world's biggest brands that kind of use our our blend of SAS and and Studio to deliver iot programs Levi's NFC enabled genes estate companies with their Global iot partner hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the iot for all podcast the number of publication and resource for the internet of things I'm your host Ryan Chacon on today's episode we have Cameron worth the founder and CEO of sharp end they are an Integrated Solutions partner offering industry-leading SAS platform for connected products supported by a global Pioneer of iot Engagement a lot of very cool stuff happening there great conversation today we talk about NFC if you are unfamiliar with that we'll explain it to you we'll talk about the future of it how companies can go big with it what's stopping companies from going big with NFC um and how NFC technology and iot Technologies are disrupting Industries like the beauty and fashion space um so all in all fantastic conversation I think we'll get a lot of value out of but before we get into it any of you out there are looking to enter the fast growing and profitable iot Market but don't know where to start check out our sponsor leverage leverages iot Solutions development platform provides everything you need to create TurnKey iot products that you can white label and resell under your own brand to learn more go to iot changes everything.com that's iot changes everything.com and without further Ado please enjoy this episode of the iot for all podcast welcome camera2 for all podcasts thanks for being here this week thank you for having me Ryan absolutely I'm looking forward to the conversation um let's kick this off by having to give a quick introduction about yourself to our audience yeah uh my name is Cameron I'm the founder and sometimes accused of being the CEO of sharpens we're a 50-person company headquartered in London uh office in New York delivering Global iot programs for the world's biggest brands fantastic and tell them I'd love to hear a little bit more about the founding story of the company so you know where did the idea for for what you all do come from what was the opportunity you saw and and kind of take us through that yeah so so I I consider us as a bit of like uh like an ugly stepchild of the iot industry because we're not really what you would consider an iot player but we're very much a kind of a core part of the ecosystem company or uncomfortably and the reason I say that is because when we started the iot seven years ago eight years ago nearly now was fridges that were supposed to reorder your milk and that was going to be the thing that was happening and everyone needs to get ready for a world where milk doesn't spoil because it's always coming to the rescue right and then the cats were going to be able to get into the same house because of RFID and their collars you know there was all these kind of weird stuff right right right if I remember if I remember correctly and this is drawing back slightly and I might have got my my company names wrong but I remember um thing works when it sold to PTC I think that was hopefully I've got the names right but I remember they did they did they they tracked bananas in crates for companies you know and that that was like something I could understand something that had a clear value and something that kind of meant something to certain people I sort of looked at that and I said well actually what I want to try and do is find like very very clear demonstrable use cases for the iot for cool Brands so I went to Absolute vodka for example and said well hey everyone's talking weird stuff about fridges what about if we put NFC or QR codes into 125 million bottles of absolute vodka you've just created a whole new owned media channel uh and what happens when Nivea wants to roll out QR codes across all their skincare products and so what we really did is we were quite responsible for bringing Brands and marketers into the kind of iot ecosystem so if you look ahead you know fast forward to seven years now we've got a bunch of the world's biggest brands that kind of use our our blend of SAS and and Studio to deliver iot programs Levi's NFC enabled genes estate companies with their Global iot partner um temporary group diagio PepsiCo okay yeah so we've got a lot of these kind of big credible meaningful deployments of iot but it's iot and the sense that it focuses very much on kind of connected packaging and connected right so just to kind of finish that emotional monologue uh the the next one to think about is okay well where did iot sit in the advertising ecosystem because if we're not from the iot space then we must come from advertising but actually in advertising and media product is media iot for engagement it didn't exist either so we kind of created this sort of New Field that Bridges experience physical digital and technology and we've done it pretty well and you can see now a lot of people look to us for for kind of where the industry is going from a marketing and an engagement perspective so fantastic yeah yeah that's awesome that's congrats on all the success you've had um I did want to ask about those Industries specifically which we don't get the opportunity to kind of dive into all that often how is iot really playing a role in those Industries it sounds like there's obviously applications there but from your experience um how accepting have those Industries more you know the the the beverage industry Beauty fashion Wellness Etc how have they really been from a receptive standpoint on receiving kind of iot and implementing iot Technologies yeah it's it's a great question man and and like the the thing that we had to do first was change the language because there was all of these in in the again we go back seven or eight years because bear in mind for the first five years sharpen wasn't a mainstream concept but since covid everyone's using QR NFC augmented reality and now all of the brands are kind of coming back to shopping now and saying hey the thing you told us about in 2017 we need to kind of do it now because everyone's looking at it um we had to change the language because what happened was as well is a lot of these kind of iot businesses if you're an iot platform or an iot technology everyone was chasing marketing budget and everyone was trying to speak to CMOS and chief digital officers and all this kind of stuff and they were really screwing up the conversation because they weren't speaking to Brand challenges business objectives consumer needs so we didn't want to come in and say hey we do iot we're an iot agency we had to really distill it down into very concrete use cases around connected products retail Innovation connected home and really kind of focus it very specifically on use cases because then at that point you've taken iot out of the language because what we found early on is you say iot and they say oh we spoke to a bunch of iot companies and and there's nothing there for us and we all know that there's a huge amount of value across the supply chain and and kind of you know going through into kind of retail and through consumption that there's a huge value proposition for iot but you had all of these companies that were saying hey we're going to be the you know the new sales force and they're all going to the brands and say you need an iot platform and you know you need to work with us and the brands were kind of put off by and a little bit turned off by the iot so step one was to change the language and distill it down into use cases and then step two in terms of where the real value is I consider myself an iot guy but I'm always on the on the fringes of the iot industry because it doesn't pay you know pay my bills to to sort of be a part of every supply chain conversation around traceability and you know foreign the easiest thing that I can do or the best thing that I can do for the industry is make sure that brands are incorporating products as media channels because if you then have digital Triggers on products QR codes NFC tags watermarking Etc then it's much easier to bring the rest of the business along on the journey and say hey we're using it to do uh engagement over here but did you know we can also do supply chain traceability with the same ID you know what I mean so you look at some Avery Dennison for example you know they've got their their product Cloud Atma atma's fully focused on kind of traceability transparency and that's really what they want to be able to do what we what we really want to do and what we do very well is the engagement and the experience part and when you can kind of bring those two things together that's when it becomes iot in my opinion when you can do everything along the product Journey that users essentially connected products to be able to deliver business and brand applications okay and then also you've got all of the other obvious bits the ingredient management supply chain tracking you know Logistics and all that kind of stuff but there is much smarter people who get paid much more money than I do to figure those things out so I got you uh I did I did want to ask um so we've talked about or you mentioned NFC Technologies and um obviously they're playing a role in disrupting a lot of these industries two-part question that I wanted to ask is the first can you just give a quick overview of NFC kind of technology for audience just so they understand exactly what it is how it works and then and talk a little bit more about how NFC um Technologies and even other iot Technologies for that regard are really disrupting um Industries like the beauty and fashion Industries because I've had a couple guests on here who've talked about certain applications of Technology Technologies but I feel like you're much closer to a lot of these things and it'd be really interesting to kind of hear a little bit more about that yeah so so I mean as an individual I've been living and breathing kind of QR codes NFC augmented reality for nearly 10 years now um QR codes were kind of where where it started everyone knows 1994 then so wave tracking car parts through the automotive process and blah blah blah NFC was born out of RFID technology but it was it was designed to work on a much smaller range because it was much more focused around like discrete applications like payments for example so rather than RFID which is monitoring you know DVDs in electronic shops then NFC is much more focused around smaller shorter interactions like mobile payments etc etc okay that's probably a very easy way to to describe the function of NFC the the manifestation of NFC is a small tag right so where RFID has like big powered units and RFID tags and stuff NFC is generally like an adhesive sticker uh it has a drive it has an antenna it's got a substrate and essentially the the purpose for NFC in the context of like engagement is to is to broadcast a URL to a smartphone so you go within five centimeters of the tag with your smartphone it pops up with a browser notification you're then able to launch the experience that's really the main function for for NFC right now um there's there's kind of the more intricate parts of NFC uh such as it kind of having a you hit a new ID in some of the tags which is great for authentication so you don't just look for the URL but you look for the URL that's paired with this unique identifier that's hidden deep inside the tag um which is good for brand protection but but the main there's two things that make NFC stand out against QR because NFC versus QR is always the conversation that you can have the the first one is the unique um encoding of NFC it's much easier because it happens at the factory you're just spinning out NFC tags that all have unique identities so I would be able to know that every single one of my products is uniquely identifiable and with QR codes you would need to have you know high-speed digital printing techniques to be able to support that kind of uh that kind of a use case so that's the first one and the second one is is just it feels more luxury right it costs more so a QR code is basically free to produce um apart from using the platform but then the the NFC tag is generally you know 12 to 15 Dollar cents up depending on uh on on order volumes but it's much better for cosmetics uh fashion things that need a bit more of a kind of a discrete and a high touch feel right QR codes aren't really aesthetically pleasing um NFC is a much nicer user Journey right you take your phone out you tap a tag something pops up you open it you go to a cool experience um and then the integration part is a bit more complex you know so for example the work that we did with Levi's we integrated NFC tags into all of their back patches for one of their collabs you have to go through a whole production test around machine washing spin testing withstanding heat withstanding cold making sure that it's machine washable so that there's a bit more complexity to integrating NFC but but generally it's the technology of choice for our cosmetics and flashing content and what are the biggest challenges um for Brands looking to really grow their NFC usage or or you know what's really stopping them from from going down that path if if anything yeah it's um there's kind of you know being from London so I always have kind of anecdotes as the way that I sort of make sense of the world but I remember with one of our drinks clients they they're like the global creative agency and I was in the room and they said why why a sharp end here we can do NFC I said okay fine well if you can understand the difference between type one to four NFC Forum certified tags and if you know the difference between you know my fair and X Y and Z and if you're able to do the unique encoding at a platform level and if you're able to work with a label converter if you're able to do the production line thing and build the experience then you're welcome to the brief and it's kind of when you say that they were like actually sharpener probably got a role to play this so then the the thing for me is it's about being able to put everything together it's about understanding how labels are applied to products and how you integrate NFC and how you test them on the line and how you communicate it on pack and how you build the right experience that makes people want to engage so being able to make sure that they can give you everything and they know they can give you everything that's the first barrier second barrier is cost uh well you know it's going to increase my cost of goods quite significantly if I'm embracing NFC at scale but actually what the what you can kind of do is start thinking okay are we are we spending more on the product but are we spending Less on capturing data for example so if we're delivering an experience that generates first party data acquisition is there a solid business case that says no because we're spending four dollars per email address on these channels can we spend two dollars on product as media channel and can we get the same data cleaner with opt-in so it's kind of about understanding the business case and then the third one is scaling I think that it's very it's not very easy but it's much easier to deliver limited edition pack rollouts of NFC than it is to do like an always-on full rollout of the technology like we've done before because you need to be able to work with local agencies you need to be able to industrialize the processes start working across Supply chains start building more use cases but like I said for me it's always much more and maybe it's just because I have a simple brain but it's much easier to speak to marketers and digital and right and get them to adopt the technology as a test and then get them to work with the rest of the business on saying hey but you can also do traceability you can also do authentication you can also do e-commerce majority driving so it's about understanding what the use cases are that are going to drive the right conversations around the business because that's how it scales yeah right right yeah it totally makes sense um and where do you kind of see the future of NFC technology going not just the technology itself but the use cases the adoption that kind of thing what are you most bullish about um or do you see other Industries maybe they're not utilizing the technology that would be good fits so you kind of see it come you know evolving into from an adoption standpoint I think I think fashion and luxury is is in an interesting space right now fashion luxury seems to just be in a in a competition about who you can put QR codes on their labels I think that's uh that for me is like a rush to technology which is everyone else is putting QR codes and stuff we need to get QR codes on our labels right most of our and I say most because we've got some good examples of clothing brands that have rolled out QR and their garments but I think NFC is going to be the dominant technology in fashion and luxury just because of the the the the high touch experience of engaging with NFC and the unique identity within the the the tag that kind of gives the product a personality um so for me I think that's going to be the big one we've got a very big announcement in September around um a luxury brand embracing NFC which we can share share with you in more detail in a couple of weeks um NFC I mean to be honest I think it's more about I think actually I think probably what I could do is answer it in a slightly uh important manner which is the problem isn't with NFC the problem is with the fragmentation of platforms and every NFC tech company right now is either building their own platform or partnering with another one and then you've kind of got eight tag companies who are all doing different things on a platform level but they all kind of do the same thing there's no real competitive advantage on any of them okay so it's going to be different because you're going to have tag providers that are saying we want to become a digital business by 2027 and we need to have a software component and it's just going to slow the market down because a brand might have a license to our platform globally but then the NFC tag company saying no no you have to use our platform to buy our tags did you see I mean it's all just getting a very much now um and I think this is going to just be another another bit of a I don't know how long you've been in the space for but there's been a couple of these things there was like the the thin films of this world who promised one cent NFC tags and the whole Market went in the film for a while and then everyone realized that was after about two years and then they were like yeah okay well where do we go from here and then the next one was um you know company X promising this type of tag and then the market moves that way and now everyone's promising a platform and so you just kind of wait for these extremes to just kind of slow down and everyone just kind of ends up calm in the center yeah no it's a fantastic um it's a very interesting space to pay attention to as new Smart Technologies are getting implemented and adopted and used by not just the customer or the companies but also the customer and the end user so um something you have some very exciting things going on over there uh for audience who wants to learn more potentially follow up on this conversation ask questions anything like that dive more into just what you all have going on what's the best way they can do that uh I mean sharpened.com

s-h-a-r-p-e-n-d.com is the website it's got information about the studio about the platform um yeah and that that's generally the best way I mean I'm on LinkedIn Cameron worth shopping it's the only kind of social media presence yeah just uh yeah appreciate your appreciate your time and questions and yeah if you agree with me if you kind of agree with me in this kind of Journey that the iot has been on it's kind of been chasing its own fads for the last five or six years yeah it to a degree I I get where you're coming from um I mean you know even on like the platform and and more Enterprise Commercial side of things platforms have always been a big thing right everyone owned their own platform they realize that that and the fragmentation of the market just wasn't realistic to lend itself well to adoption across different areas so I think people have kind of started to go a little bit further away from that and we're seeing some consolidation of the industry in different areas different players and things like along those lines so um yeah it's it's super interesting you know one of my goals has always really been to try to Showcase what iot can really do and not just focus on hypothetical hypothetical or conceptual ideas of iot which I think a lot of people get hung up on on here's what it could do and for your business but until you actually prove out the success improve the scale prove the Technologies work in that environment and so forth It's hard for people to really want to put their money towards adopting it and I think we need to see more of those successes in order for adoption to continue to grow and the industry to succeed together yeah yeah I think if I could leave you with one sort of yeah you've just said I said the iot can save you money in marketing costs yeah sure yeah I think that's a unique angle too because that's not necessarily something a lot of the businesses I've spoken to their use cases are haven't really touched on that as much but when you're talking about more consumer facing Industries like you are involved in definitely it makes a ton of sense and it's super interesting to kind of explore great thanks for your time Ryan yeah thank you so much really appreciate it and um love can't wait to get this out and you know would love to have you back at some point talk further about what's going on in space easy man thank you thank you all right everyone thanks again for watching that episode of the iot for all podcast if you enjoyed the episode please click the Thumbs Up Button subscribe to our Channel and be sure to hit the Bell notifications so you get the latest episodes as soon as they become available other than that thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time

2022-11-10 10:50

Other news