Within a limited number of Canadian Tire physical stores, a test is now underway to see how in store shoppers react and use a new touch screen Fujitsu kiosk that enables them to browse the weekly flyer (ShopLocal powered of course) among a product locator, price verifier and browsing the CanadianTire.com site.
It’s exciting to see high engagement technologies creep back into the physical retailer world. There is a real un-tapped value proposition that retailers need to capitalize on of blurring the lines between the different channels.
Canadian Tire has done a great job of creating a strong visual identify around these kiosks which are called iShop by wrapping the rather boring looking, underlying kiosk in a "skin" of sorts that definitely is more inviting to shoppers.
Here is the "un-wrapped" (or non-branded) Fujitsu made touch screen kiosk that is internet enabled that is being deployed into two (2) Canadian Tire stores on a limited test basis.
The book sellers (Borders and Barnes & Noble) for example has been doing exactly this for a number of years by allows in store shoppers to break free from the limitations of the books available for sale in the physical store to the countless millions more available within the online store by utilizing kiosks. This just makes so much sense, and prevents a shopper whom didn’t see the book in store from going home an ordering it on Amazon.com.
The Canadian Tire use of the flyer (that is what Canadian’s call circulars or inserts) within these Fujitsu kiosks is very similar to the problem that Ecast is also trying to solve. In that, wayfinding (i.e., digital in store maps) combined with engaging “what’s on sale right now” content is a great way to help create motivation for a shopper to visit areas of a store that they may not typically travel to. It also aides in new product discovery as the currently on sale products can be highlighted and showcased. In addition, it is expected to decrease the number of abandoned baskets and increase customer satisfaction as shoppers can now get the answer to their #1 most asked question of, “Where can I find product X?”
Simplification of the overall SmartCircular Adobe Flash/Flex based interface was a key theme in this project here at ShopLocal, in that:
- Super-large navigation visuals were employed
- Only one circular page turning mode was used
- No shopper inputs (of for example a postal code) are required
- No category, brand, keyword search, shopping list, store details or 25 other different views are offered. Just simple circular / flyer ad page viewing and turning
Integration was the other theme which allowed:
- Tying into an interactive store maps and in store inventory called iPAL (made by TreoSystems) that creates a seamless product locator action by simply clicking on any of the items within the flyer
- For the store’s postal code to be passed into the weekly flyer application so as to take away a dumb user input from occurring
This is the main flyer view that offers a single page by page, animated page turning mode to browsing the Canadian Tire on sale items. All of this flyer content is of course locally geo-targeted to the specific store location of where the kiosk is located.
From within the interactive flyer, a simple help layer can be accessed at any point to aide any customers that need additional instructions on how to navigate the kiosk version of the Canadian Tire SmartCircular site.
By clicking on any product that is contained within the interactive flyer, the user is taken to an visual map of where that specific item
All things deals, sales and coupons are red hot and the smart folks over at Gannett Digital has been listening to this ever growing consumer demand. So a combined team from ShopLocal, Planet Discover and Gannett Digital has been working together over the last few months to create a streamlined and consolidated “deals” experience for nearly all of the local newspaper.com sites that Gannett operates.
The result of this effort is visible at deals.desmoinesregister.com which does a great job of bringing together many different types of deals all under one unified site. From a user’s point for view, this is absolutely the right move, as it consolidates local deal content that was previously fragmented all across the newspaper.com site and wraps it up in a searchable and browseable manner.
The types of content that are available in these deals sites to shoppers include:
The Des Moines Register just launched the first of many new local deals sites. This is the main entry page of the deal site. All of the dynamic, localized data that appears in the "Sunday deals all week long" section comes from ShopLocal's SmartDelivery API including the three most popular circular front cover images for that market.
From the 'Weekly Deals' link in the top menu bar, a user is taken into the familiar CircularCentral flash based user interface that allows a shopper to browse all of the newspaper ads online in one easy to use location.
Within an new eMarketer report that looks at a Myers Publishing forecast on US advertising, the Internet is on pace to be the top media channel for advertising spend by 2011. This is why being in the digital advertising space is the right place to be. However for my friends in TV, if one was to aggregate the various sub-forms such as broadcast, national and local spots and cable, they still win in this rollout view. The only thing everyone on the digital side continues to talk about and yearn for is the shift of dollars to online to happen at a faster pace than currently foretasted below.
There really is a shift in dollars underway and continuing in the coming years between more traditional channels and digital.
So here are the tidbits that stuck in my mind from ad:tech Chicago 2009 day #2:
Overall Digital Advertising / Marketing
- The total of all non-search digital advertising in 2009 is roughly only $10 billion dollars
- Basic measurement of audience size by services like Nielsen NetRatings have some fundamental flaws. For example, MLB.com reported total monthly page views in July of 2009 of close to 14 billion, while Nielsen NetRatings only reported 900 million. This huge error factor is one of the core reasons that spending online is being held back, as offline channels have trusted and fairly accurate measurement techniques and audience audit companies. One of the challenges is to the fundamental approach that Nielsen takes, which is panel based and not an audit based
- One idea taken from the movie studios that digital content owners should at least consider is the following: A consumer that goes to a movie theater pays for a ticket to see the film. That same consumer has to pay again if they want to, at a later point, watch the same movie at home via a DVD rental. The issue is some publishers that charge are adopting a model that is a pay once for global access across all mediums / content access points. This go directly against the model that the movie studios operate under where consumers must pay each time for each unique content consumption session
- On a successful paid content site such as MLB.com, only 5% of all users that visit this site convert to becoming a paid content subscriber. 95% of users come and only consume the free content on the site. Also mentioned that just because you have great content, it does not mean you will get consumers to pay. You have to have still have a great user experience. Also have to offer a free route (think WSJ here) and show these free users what they are missing out on (and the flip side, for those who do pay you need to show the added value of all the things that they are only able to get)
- Some panel experts where predicting a 13% drop within traditional advertising in 2009, but digital growing at around 10%
- Don Hamblen, the CMO at Sears Roebuck, Co. had these thoughts:
- To measure ROBO impacts, market mix modeling
- Really sees the power of combining both search AND display
- Search is the “new” circular for the purposes of customer acquisition and outreach
- The balance or mix percentage is not clear yet, but there seems to be an underlying agreement that there needs to be some split of advertising dollars across both integrated marketing AND traditional buying space & time (eg ad inventory)
- Technology is accelerating faster then one can keep up with. The goal instead of trying to run this rat race is to elevate above. The analogy given was the classic Wayne Gretzsky where the saying goes, “Don’t skate to where the puck is. Skate to where the puck will be.”
Social Media
- Around 40% – 45% of all internet users use at least one social site
- Twitter users only account for 11% of the overall Internet audience, or roughly 18 million people
- 50% of social users interact with social media on a daily basis
- The total ad dollars spent on social media in 2009 is just about $1 billion, which is just about 5% of the total advertising spend overall
Video
- The internet receives the largest share of time spent of any type of media during the generally agreed upon 8 hours media consumption day , at 29% (TV gets 27% for a reference point)
- Video equates to nearly a third (29%) of all time spent on the internet
- Nearly 2 in 5 broadband users have watched video online in the past 24 hours
- B2B audiences are not typically looking for nor motivated by online video
- Online video remains largely sold via CPM pricing, and is more expensive due to the scarcity and limited nature (when compared to network television)
Widget / Apps / Facebook Connect
- Social applications (sites within sites such as a Fan Page within Facebook) are best for mass reach. Also often times excel at the amount of engagement that these type of deployments can create
- Widgets are great for pushing content out and driving users back to a centralized location
- Facebook connect is best for bringing in bits social content into an existing web site experience
- The Three (3) B’s Of Widgets: Be there. Be relevant. Be useful.
- A ‘fan’ is more valuable than an email. Emails don’t multiple or amplify. Fans do
- A Twitter follower of Facebook fan should be thought about as a social CRM database and not an audience to blast messages to
- Standards are being set across the industry. Facebook is solely driven this. A “fan” is now a standard measure of ROI for social, just like an email address. A fan can be re-marketed to for example, much like an email
- There is NOT however a standard set of value that can be assigned to many of the social interactions. For example, what is one complete video view worth? $0.25? $1.00? One suggestion was to try and relate these type of social metrics back to the easily understandable costs of either Google CPC rates or display CPMs
- Suggestions to at least always share with client, other newer metrics that show a complete cost overview as it relates to the core KPI goal of the campaign / medium: Cost Per View, Cost Per Upload, Cost Per Install, Cost Per User
- One big issue is when a social campaign ends. What to do with the widget now? How to continue engaging your new Facebook fans?
- Brands should start thinking of their content as a web service that delivers that content across any platform or sites. This delivery engine of a brands content / messaging then reduces the risk of any one platform failing
- Stand alone gaming web sites are re-surging among the younger crowd
- App click thrus are higher than ads within Facebook. Example: 0.2% – 0.3% average click thru rates on RockYou apps which are higher than Facebook ads
There’s an old saying “without trust there is nothing” and as marketers we know that if we lose the trust of our audience we lose our voice. Good news for digital marketers, a new Nielsen study found that consumers trust information and opinions that they find online.
“The explosion in Consumer Generated Media over the last couple of years means consumers’ reliance on word of mouth in the decision-making process, either from people they know or online consumers they don’t, has increased significantly,” says Jonathan Carson, President of Online, International, for the Nielsen Company.
Validating that crowd sourced content matters, Nielsen’s Global Online Consumer Survey found that 90 percent of participants said that they trust recommendations from people they know, and 70 percent trust consumer opinions posted online. In addition, 70 percent of the participants trust brand websites which is even better news for digital marketers.
Nielsen Survey Consumers Trust Online Opinions
According to Carson, “It also shows that, despite the authority of word of mouth when it comes to consumer decision-making, advertisers still have a major say in the process. The website, and monitoring feedback through it, is a golden opportunity for advertisers to shape the tone and content of consumer opinion before it reaches the digital masses.”
This ties in perfectly to our philosophy here at ShopLocal. Present shoppers with what they want… targeted, relevant retail promotions. Then add value by coupling those promotions with valuable information like crowd sourced opinions and ratings. And of course constantly evaluate and optimize so that every shopper receives a great personalized experience.
To view the entire Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey click here.
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