September 21st, 2011, Sydney, Australia. JCDecaux and Tapit have signed an exclusive two year agreement creating Australia's first dedicated Near Field Communications (NFC) Out of Home (OOH) advertising network.

With a dedicated OOH NFC network across Australia, agencies and brands can now extend their reach onto the customers mobile phone. Everything from treasure hunts to localised coupon offers.
Tapit CEO
Tapit CEO

Tapit will connect 240 panels across JCDecaux's street furniture inventory to Tapit systems. This will enable advertisers to create OOH campaigns that consumers can interact with via their mobile phones. People walking past an enabled JCDecaux panel will simply be able to tap their NFC enabled phone on the Tapit symbol to retrieve all types of mobile content.

Steve O'Connor CEO of JCDecaux Australia said "By the end of 2011 it's anticipated that over 80% of mobile handsets in Australia will have internet capability.  As a consequence, Outdoor is set to play an increasingly important role in helping advertisers drive an online offering. Recognizing this growth potential we have partnered with an established specialist company in Tapit to ensure we deliver for advertisers the best possible connectivity."

Jamie Conyngham CEO of Tapit added "This is exciting stuff, because of the JCDecaux / Tapit combination, new types of OOH mobile campaigns are now possible. This is not only about downloading content from street furniture, we can now drive people from the street furniture into the nearest store to increase sales through incentives".

Tapit has already completed four NFC enabled campaigns with the global OOH leader JCDecaux. In a campaign for the prime time TV series the "The Renovators" users were encouraged to tapit to download a ringtone. Advertising for Sydney's top radio station "Nova FM" enabled users to tapit to stream radio and in a promotion for The QVB, one of central Sydney's premier shopping centres, people were encouraged to tapit to go in the draw to win a shopping spree.

In order to give JCDecaux's advertisers maximum reach to the mobile consumer, Tapit also provides integrated SMS and QR capability. JCDecaux clients can request any or all of the mobile options but both JCDecaux and Tapit believe NFC is the future.

Now that the NFC network is in place, brands and agencies can truly join physical advertising to digital advertising in a simple way. Not only that, they can plan campaigns where each panel does different things depending upon it's location and time of day.