- To hear Paco Underhill tell it, the scene in Steven Spielberg's
futuristic Minority Report, in which Tom Cruise's character is besieged
by video advertising targeted directly at him as he walks down the street,
is, even today, more than pure science fiction.
-
- Already, thanks to cell-phone technology that can track
subscribers' whereabouts, retailers have access to technology that can
tell when a particular customer walks into a store. With that information
in hand, stores could conceivably tailor marketing messages to people based
on demographic data or on answers to questions they were asked when they
signed up for cell-phone service.
-
- And while consumers may wish for less-intrusive advertising,
it appears, short of permanently shutting their wallets, they may not be
able to fend off the coming wave of mobile-target marketing.
-
- "It isn't futuristic, it's right now, it's real,"
says Underhill, author of the bestseller Why We Buy. "That technology's
out there now. It's just a matter of finding people willing to pay for
it."
-
- Today, Underhill says, retailers face a real challenge:
Fashioning advertising technology that both takes advantage of the latest
innovations coming out of research labs and actually resonates with consumers.
But while Underhill says that task is not easy, he also says it can be
done -- now.
-
- Shane Booth, a researcher at Mitsubishi Electric Research
Laboratories, or MERL, believes he's found one approach that works. When
it comes to market, it could change the way in-store merchandising is done.
-
- Booth's team is developing a system that projects product
information onto a wall. As a customer approaches the wall, the system
senses that someone is getting closer and alters the message it projects,
incorporating data about the person gleaned through facial-recognition
technology. The closer the customer approaches, the more specific the information
gets. Eventually, the message would focus on the actual product the person
is handling.
-
- Booth says that his team's system is based on more than
20 sensors that evaluate where people are in relationship to a display.
And, because the display is projected rather than on a fixed screen, it
can be directed anywhere. More importantly, the system can sense how people
are reacting to the messages by tracking whether they are approaching the
product and continuing to watch the ad or turning away. That information
then gets reported to managers.
-
- "If you put that data to use, it's a big amount
of data about who's looking at (products), for how long, what they're looking
at, and it's all real-time data," says Booth. "Imagine being
the store manager in the back, seeing this display. If (messages) aren't
working, the displays learn who's looking at it, and can cater" the
message.
-
- Perhaps more scary, admits Booth, is that the system
also can tailor messages to individuals based on demographic information
it gathers about them as they walk around a store. That is done through
facial-recognition technology built into the system that can determine
race, age and sex.
-
- Thus, demographically tailored messages can be projected
instantly onto a wall near specific customers.
-
- The goal, explains Booth, is to find new ways of luring
customers and keeping them engaged with marketing messages and products.
The more time they spend looking at a video product display, the more likely
it is that they will buy that product.
-
- Of course, says Booth, the magic here is not just in
the technology but in devising the content.
-
- "Content is king. The system could (be) smart, but
if your content sucks, people aren't going to watch," he says.
-
- Underhill agrees, and says merchants need to recast their
beliefs regarding how long customers are going to pay attention to messages.
He explains that often, digital signage is programmed with 15 seconds of
content, while customers may turn away after four seconds. Thus, he says,
rather than trying to find ways to get customers to stick around for the
full 15 seconds, marketers should instead make those four seconds count.
-
- "You don't want to run into other people, you're
with somebody else, or there's a pretty girl across the (way). There's
a number of things competing for your visual focus," says Underhill.
"One of the historical ways that we deliver successful information
is delivering it to people on the move, and rather than stopping, they
have to slow down."
-
- Underhill says one of the technologies he's seen recently
that might make a difference to retailers is an IBM system, still in development,
that projects images at angles off of walls. Thus, by putting such a system
in the corner of a room, the same image can be projected onto four different
walls, maximizing the effect.
-
- Another advantage of such a system to retailers, Underhill
says, is that it could be far cheaper than investing in costly plasma displays.
-
- Of course, IBM also is putting its energies into new
plasma technologies geared to retailers.
-
- "If you simply put up plasma screens ... everybody
goes, 'Wow, they look nice,'" says Warren Hart, vice president of
digital media at IBM. "But if you only run TV ads, you're wasting
your time.... Unless what you're doing is thoughtfully designed, you're
not engaging the consumer."
-
- With that in mind, IBM is developing technology that
allows retailers to draw from a database of digital content that can be
changed instantly and can be chosen to appeal to customers based on time
of day, weather, sex, age and other factors.
-
- Further, the content can be transmitted to plasma displays
wirelessly, with individual screens showing different content. All of this
can be controlled remotely and in ways that store managers feel best promote
the stores' products.
-
- But Underhill cautions that retailers have to be careful
what technologies they get excited about.
-
- In his consulting practice at Envirosell, Underhill says
he often finds that merchants have spent so much money on digital technology
that they don't have any cash left for the software they need to keep it
up-to-date.
-
- Another common problem is that the technologies that
excite marketers commonly repel the people they're trying to target. Oftentimes,
consumers find ultra-targeted marketing frustrating, a reaction exacerbated
by the fact that there's not much they can do to make it go away.
-
- As Underhill puts it, "One of the poignancies of
our era is that our technology has moved at lightning speeds past what
our privacy laws are.
-
- "One of the realities of our lives is that we have
a consumer base out there that is reacting very badly to some of the ways
technology and marketing have met," he says.
-
- © Copyright 2003, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
-
- http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,61597,00.html
|
