The possibilities of distribution points for weekly ad content continues to increase. Today two versions of the same core weekly ad application went live for Target. These apps were built to live on user’s start / homepages that iGoogle and My Yahoo! pretty much have a monopoly on. Specifically the two apps that went live were for:
Here is what the two apps look like in their native state once they have been “installed” within a user’s personalized homepage (Note that all throughout this post I use the word ‘install’ very loosely. What I am trying to refer to is the process of allowing and adding these apps/gadgets to a user’s homepage. No real code is actually being installed on a user’s local machine):
This is how the My Yahoo! open app appears on a user's homepage in its native 'small' state
The iGoogle gadget and how is appears on a user's homepage in it's native 'un-expanded' state
Here is what each app looks like once a user chooses to expand them to the ‘large’ view:
This is how the My Yahoo! open app appears in its "expanded" state
This is how the iGoogle gadget appears in its "expanded" state
So now for a quick comparison of these two competing platforms:
- My Yahoo!
- A much more complicated ‘install’ process that involves up to three different clicks, compared to the one (1) click ‘install’ on iGoogle. Yes, Yahoo! Open Apps allow for more user driven privacy controls and a great degree of social features, so these come at a cost of a more involved ‘installation’ process
- The “full” or “expanded” view of the app can be built in Adobe Flash / Flex, which in this case the Target app is. This just opens up the door to a richer, more engaging user experience
- The “full” or “expanded” view has some graphical display ads wrapped around the content. I happened to catch one ad with some layering / shine-through issues going on that was interfering with the right hand part of the app
- By default, it appears that the Target Open app within My Yahoo! is setup to auto opt-in all users into the below two (2) types of communications. Great for the marketer, but maybe not so great for the unknowing consumer:
- iGoogle
- Within the native, non-expanded view, the gadget gets cut-off. This looks sort of odd and is a bummer since this is the view state that most users will see the vast majority of the time
- Built using light, fast and universal coding languages such as HTML, Javascript and DHTML
- Since it is not built in flash, in this case a much deeper integration is exposed at the item detail page that pulls in an Amazon.com hosted layer that brings in all sorts of rich functionality like local inventory look up, one-click add to cart, add to lists, ratings and reviews
- If a user decides to ’share’ the app with friends, within iGoogle the app makes some useful suggestions as to which friends of yours you might consider based upon your emailing habits within Gmail. With Yahoo!, this is just one big blank box that is nowhere as user friendly
Here is a complete set of production screen grabs of the widgets from both iGoogle and My Yahoo! posted up on Flickr just in case. Finally, a bit of well deserved recognition to the Target and AKQA teams that did all of the heavy lifting to get these fairly complex apps launched.
Let’s take any given circular / weekly ad page. Doesn’t matter which retailer, which page, which newspaper. Any old page will due just fine for this example.
Example circular page image
Examine the image above careful. What factual statements would you make? A few of the more obvious ones may include:
- There are a total of seven (7) items advertised on sale
- The price range of items on this page spans from $4 all the way up to $249
- The allergy OTC medications represent over 75% of the total page area
- There are at least four (4) unique sub categories of items represented
What this exercise is essentially causing you to do is create metadata – data about other data. A more exact definition may be that metadata is definitional data that provides information about or documentation of other data managed within an application or environment.
Example of some image metadata about the pumpkin-thing on the left
In any case, the ShopLocal team just unlocked a new dimension of metadata around the circular pages that we process for most retailers in America. What the team just released allows the back end database systems to compute and create new metadata about each circular page. As of yesterday, for every single circular page processed, the ShopLocal system is computing a number of category “labels” for any given circular page.
So refer back to the example circular page image above. If we apply this logic of category label creation to this image, one would come out with the following ranked ordered list of descriptive category labels:
- Four (4) over the counter (OTC) drug items (which these individual items were all categorized under the following structure Grocery & Essentials (L1) -> Health (L2))
- Three (3) homeware items (which these individual items are categorized under the following structures: Home (L1) ->Vacuums (L2), Home (L1) -> Bed and Home (L2) -> Home Improvement (L2))
From this simple assessment, ShopLocal would be able to label (or ‘tag’) this circular page image as being first and foremost a Grocery & Essentials circular page with a secondary label of Home being applied. We actual look at the overall category percentage density at the level 1 category level and assign a ranking – needless to say, it offers very accurately category labeling. From this point forward, the fun really begins.
A few examples application that uses and requires this type of circular page category label metadata would be:
- As a marketer, image you are trying to create a link from your weekly newsletter that drives users to the place within the online circular site that best represents the on sale electronics category items. This marketer does NOT know which exact circular page contains the most electronic items, especially week-to-week, version-to-version
- As a marketer, you want to offer your users a new way of browsing the weekly ad items by category. Rather than using the typical gridded results sets manner that most category / search result pages do, you as the marketer still want to keep your users within the circular page context. Imagine browsing the online circular in the page-by-page mode, but ONLY viewing those page(s) that are relevant to a specific category. In this example, this would mean that since the user was trying to view electronics content, only circular pages 14, 3, 27 and 11 would be shown as those are the only pages that contain electronics items. Even the ranked density order is maintained which is why the odd, non-linear order is created since page 14 has more electronics items that page 11.
The word ‘mesh’ has become very popular in recent years in the tech community to describe how the gradual evolution of the web is weaving many disparate elements together. So this same principle has been hard at work between ShopLocal and it’s retailer clients. More and more, the lines of where a retailer’s site start and ShopLocal’s microsites (called SmartCircular) begin are very blurred (and visa-versa).
'Meshing' or 'mashing up' data and content is the fabric of how the current web is built to a great degree
A few examples that come to mind are below that illustrate how retailers have ‘meshed’ ShopLocal circular content into their digital efforts.
And to paint a complete picture, this ‘meshing’ is bi-directional. So here are a few examples that come to mind are below that illustrate how ShopLocal has ‘meshed’ retailer’s content into the ShopLocal hosted SmartCircular sites
- Dynamic Header & Footer (where ShopLocal is pulling in the client’s branding/masthead in real time – thus giving these retailer complete flexibility and control over the site’s top level navigation)
- Other Dynamic Elements (same as headers & footers, where this retailer hosted content is pulled in to the ShopLocal hosted page in a real time manner)
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