A major benefit of the increased use of smartphones is advertising response. You see an ad, and you can immediately connect to the brand through your phone. In TV, SMS has been the most commonly used method, and it has been pretty successful. QR codes have also been tried with less proven results – it’s a pain having to open the QR reader and move towards the TV to scan it. However, audio response, or audio tagging could be the new killer app for TV response.

Most people know Shazam as a music tagging service, but the UK company are about to make a big impact in the world of advertising with Shazam for TV. They have already tried other advertising applications and the TV service has been used on some US adverts for a few months. However the ad fest that is The Super Bowl will see Shazam tags used in half of the adverts. The great advantage of audio tagging is the ease with which they can tag an ad. Unlike SMS it’s just a single tap to engage and unlike QR, it works seamlessly from the sofa.

Shazam are not the only audio tagging service for TV. IntoNow, which was acquired by Yahoo does a similar job. But Shazam has one a major advantage. They have users. 165 million of them to be exact. They have more users than Google+ or Bebo and 10 times the user base of Foursquare or Instagram. With such a significant audience the potential of Shazam TV could be massive.

More Shazam-able ads here: http://www.youtube.com/user/shazamfortv/featured