The Digital Signage ExpertThis week an overwhelming amount of clicks hit my newsletter this was: Do Smartphones Make Interactive Digital Signage Irrelevant? A good question indeed. Some of my friends suggest that this would be the case and that sooner or later everybody would have an iPhone in their pockets. Steven Jobs would be most happy. David Weinfeld quotes from Intel’s proof of concept manifesto, 6 reasons this might happen:
1. The phone is personal. Yes it is, very much so. Frankly the e-mail is even more personal, send an unsolicited e-mail today and you stand a chance to end in court. Call a mobile number and the worst that can happen to you is a click and a busy tone as the recipient hangs up. Still the mobile phone is a virtual digital fire wall in your pocket, once penetrated you are more likely to also penetrate the recipients pocketbook
2. The Phone is Social. This can be and is being exploited. In a sense if a groovy member of your social network buys does/ something, he and she can broadcast this action to all and sundry. The subtle “call-to-action” or monkey see, monkey do kicks into full gear. Corporate branding never had it so good. Plus it is measurable.
3. The Phone is touchable. Fine, I agree, like door handles who wants to touch something thousands have fondled? Especially in the paranoiac era of designer flu. The latest fashion accessory being a minibottle of antiseptic attachable to your belt. For the same reason of touch-ability the phone has become the adult pacifier of choice. You will feel more comfortable cuddling your phone while being separated from your money.
4. The phone is consumer-powerful. This is the one I like the best; YOU have the whole world in your hands. With your phone you can quickly double check your decision within a store on the spot. This power was never before possible.
5. Because a retailer can doesn’t mean they should. This is the argument being fought in the retailer boardrooms almost daily. Blast your shoppers with a call-to-action message and you might scare them away, yes you will if you use a loud hailer or address system.
6. The phone is becoming sensitive. By its nature it is, 2 frequency channels are almost always listening to Bluetooth or the network. To become RFID sensitive would mean an another sensor in the hardware. All this works both ways however. You can turn your Bluetooth off and you can finally turn your phone off. Turning off the phone will not stop marketers from knowing you are in the store, more on that in another posting.
Looking at the above, are touchscreens out? Expanding the discussion, let’s pull back the covers.
The key word in all this discussion is that of “Mobility” In-store touchscreens cannot be carried around in your pocket, or can they? What are touchscreens? They are a 21st century technology using 1950’s measurement methodologies. Touchscreens do not know who’s finger is on the button. Can this be changed? Would tying touchscreens to EPOS and analyze shopper reaction really produce results, yes and no – the statistical knowledge and programming skills needed to pull this off are expensive to say the least if you can find them. The Smartphone bridges all these concerns.
Facial recognition? We have systems today that can tell the age and sex of the viewer, these systems still cannot tell the operator if the content provided the expected response. A Smartphone would.
Newspapers are closing because they still cannot measure the response to ads placed in their papers, much less so if these ads are actually being reacted on.
All the above apply to Digital Signage and touchscreens too. We need systems that actually measure response to “call to action” and quantify it.
Mobil phone advertising provides all the above
In 2005 the mobile subscriber base was 145 million driven in most part by the Smartphone which was a major improvement of personal productivity. The introduction of the iPhone was the paradigm shift.
The gear that shifted the paradigm was simply “economics”. The shift also caused a drastic fall in traffic revenue for operators. So where was the mother lode? It was buried in “the data”. Data usage was becoming the bigger part of traffic than voice. The genie was let out of the bottle in a concept of “pipe-like” data innovation. The revenue stream was found by providing new uses of the phones to subscribers; the “new usage-model” was finally born. The fact was that this revenue stream was even more profitable than was the voice traffic, to such a point that voice traffic piggybacks data traffic for free. Still the gold was in the data, streams of gold flowed inside the data accumulated from daily use of phones. Much like the loyalty card, the smartphone revealed to marketers who you really are, what you really believe, where you are and when. There it was right in front of us. So use the phones for free, we get you on the flip-side. The Firewall was broken.
Communications wasn’t anymore the motive to own. M-commerce was rapidly gaining ground. The fulcrum point was the iTunes app, an astounding success, tying in the Apple cult from phone, computers and leisure.
Rules:
1. Handsets with multimedia sophistication
2. Carrier business models with flexibility to change and morph in real-time
3. Swarms of application developers
The buzzwords were now; m-commerce, mobile lifestyle and fully mobile entertainment.
For the consumer it’s all holistic, in a modern store, the seas of digital influences calling out for attention is already beginning to turn off the consumer. The key to escaping or accepting this deluge was the Smartphone, the consumer’s remote control, The Firewall.
James van Etten, Editor – CLIPPINGs