India wants to be a leader in visual recognition. These startups are leading the way

Shikha Gupta came across a pretty dress in a newspaper advertisement of a local fashion store. She knew it would look great on her. But Gupta didn’t want to take the trouble of visiting the shop to buy it.

For the brand, that’s a broken sales process. Though ROI (Return on Investment) driven advertising tops the list of brand marketers, tools to optimize print ads, which attract 41 percent of total ad spend, didn’t exist until recently. However, some Indian startups are experimenting with apps that make advertisements instantly shoppable.

As these startups mature, brands will get to leverage the power of the moment when users are already engaged on a print ad. They will be able to convert customer impulse into a sale.

Like a virtual salesman, these startups are also building features that recommend similar products. These transform static print advertisements into something engaging and transactional.

Here are some ‘PrinGital’ – print and digital – tools from India.

Voconow

When users view a Voconow-powered print ad through the app, it instantaneously recognizes the ad and overlays a digital layer on top of it. On the app, users can see the products from different angles, buy the products, send an inquiry, book a test drive in the case of a car, schedule a site visit of a real estate project, and so on.

In addition, Voconow provides analytics on the ad’s customer engagement. It gives insights into the demographics of engaged customers for marketing decisions like designing future product promotion campaigns, spotting trends, consumer behavior, and so on.

Voconow also serves as a channel to order complimentary products.

Voconow’s first customer was Lenovo, and together they produced interactive ads that allow users to see the Vibe X2 smartphone with different colors, view product specs, and buy the smartphone right from the print ad. Voconow declined to comment on the number of smartphones sold through its platform.

The startup has been selected for Facebook’s startup mentorship program FBStart.