Location is one of the few constants across all consumer focused industries. Most commerce still takes place in the physical world. This means dealer and store locations are the hub of this fiscal activity. However do to regional demand and taste differences, transportation costs, state regulations, etc., pricing does vary on many of these goods based upon geography.
The below auto campaign for Lexus is a great example of this. The lease offers shown below are unique to a group of dealers in Southern California. If you are from NYC, the lease offers that Lexus is offering will be different. It’s just how the game is played by companies with the required infrastructure that are capable of handling all of these pricing (and product) variations.
ShopLocal’s data localization technologies really excel at on-boarding, cleansing, normalizing, storing and making accessible 3rd party item and offer data. This localized content can come in many form, data formats and flavors. But at the core of all of this local data are dealers or stores. From that granular building block, all of the localization fun begins.
This is a story board that Team One in LA created for a localized Lexus rich media expanding leaderboard ad unit that ShopLocal helped power. All of the lease offer content within the ad is regionally based in much the same way retail print ads a versioned.
Posted on 31 August 2009 by Loch Rose
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ShopLocal continues to track the in-store deals offered by many top retailers, and our data shows unusual levels of activity. Consumer sentiment remains cautious but improving, so the retailers are working hard to offer them exceptional value, with the weighted average number of offers up 16% year-over-year in recent months.
After the post-holiday sales ended, deals returned to normal levels in March and April, but picked up significantly in late spring and summer. The retailers have given their customers some great deals heading into the important Back to School season, the question now is whether the customers have responded.
After reading the interview with the Best Buy guy whom was responsible for launching AR a few weeks ago, I was curious to see what round #2 would bring in the way of incremental changes / improvements. Well, the answer to that is not much.
Sure, a different product is being features (a Sony Eco-HDTV instead of a Toshiba laptop), but nothing else really changed. The microsite (www.BestBuyIn3D.com) could be more connected to BestBuy.com and/or the current Best Buy weekly ad site. In addition, the overall consumer messaging and value proposition could be made stronger. It’s not clear why a consumer would take the time to check out the AR enhanced print ad. Still very excited to see the innovation with augmented reality within print ads, as it offers a very fun way of blurring the lines between the offline and online worlds.
Augmented Reality second appearance within the Best Buy weekly ad. Nothing really different than the initial week's release.
Locally tailoring the content of one’s online weekly ad site is good business as it increases the relevance to the user. To meet this need, ShopLocal built out our own localized version of a content management system (CMS) that we call the SmartAd server.
Some typical use cases of the SmartAd server that retailers seems to gravitate towards include:
- Store grand openings
- In-store events
- New competitors showing up for the first time in a local market
- Related marketing messaging that they want to integrate and tie in
- Driving awareness & usage of specific features within a SmartCircular site
At a high level, the SmartAd server offers the following features. This means each unique each unique piece of content that is served can…
- Have a unique set of start and end dates associated with it that are separate than the overall circular promotion(s)
- Have a unique click-thru URL associated with them
- Have a pre-determined ranking or order assigned to each content slot
- Accept the following file formats:
- .gif
- .jpg
- .swf (ie, Adobe Flash)
- Geo-target content at the following levels:
- National – all stores
- Regional – select sets of stores
- Local – individual stores
Below are four (4) live example SmartCircular sites that are currently using the SmartAd server. There are many others, but this is a good representative list to illustrate how flexible the SmartAd server can be.
- Target
- Staples
- Toys “R” Us
- Best Buy
Target deploys four unique content blocks that all pull in content from the SmartAd server, one of which is a data driven dynamic widget that pulls in active Target catalog front cover images
Staples has been a long time user of this functionality and has had some real fun with this by creating market and store level promotions to insert so as to really go local with the messaging.
Toys R Us typically uses these SmartAd server content slots as ways of driving attention to other onsite areas or features.
Best Buy uses an interactive horizontal scrolling carousel to help manage many concurrently live SmartAd server pieces of content.
So within the last week or so, two nifty retail print ads appeared within the Chicago Tribune newspaper that promoted a reader of the print ad to go online for more information. This type of of integrated multi-channel promotion really is becoming the norm rather than the exception.
The two retailer examples that were spotted out in the wild were for Sears and Target. Both do a nice job of messaging that there are other store based deals available within the retailer’s online weekly ad site.
Sears in the bottom left hand corner (e.g., the blue box) of this print ad that appeared within the Chicago Tribune is trying to promote three e-buster deals that are only available online for a limited period of time. It also messages that there are other great deals always available within the Sears online weekly ad site.
Within the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune, Target is taking out a ROP ad every single week within the bottom of the front page that is promoting grocery deals within their SuperTarget (those Target stores that sell grocery items) stores and the same ad also attempts to drive consumers back to their online weekly ad site for more deals.
(4.00 out of 5)
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