The much overdue and heavily request multi-retailer API (the team calls it the ShopLocal Cross Retailer API or SCRAPI for short) is finally complete and live. Application development partners Spreezio and ReachEverywhere (more to come on what both of these firms are up to) played a key role in shaping and being alpha and beta release users of SCRAPI.
Basically what this new REST based web service that returns XML data allows is access to every last stitch of content that is currently displayed on ShopLocal.com. Or as one developer said, “its basically ShopLocal.com in a box”. This new API includes access to the following types of content:
- Circulars / FSIs / Catalogs / Weekly Ads (all localized)
- Run Of Press (ROP) Ads (all localized)
- eCommerce or Online Offers
- Retailer Store Locations
SCRAPI unleashes a serious punch of possibilities and access to the entire ShopLocal database
Within SCRAPI, all of the above content is normalized and fully loaded with rich meta data which allows for the following types of browsing and searching methods to take place, all via the powerful Endeca Site Search Engine:
- Guided navigation with attribute/filter refinements
- Browse by category or brand or retailer or location
- Keyword search with all the bells and whistles that great search engines utilize such as stemming, plurals, thesaurus, search re-directs, etc
- Popularity based result set rankings along with a ton of other sort orders
So for a quick recap, here is a list of all of the currently available ShopLocal API’s that trusted partners can be granted access to:
- SmartDelivery API – SDAPI – This is by far the most used, mature and deep API that ShopLocal offers. It is currently powering many different and diverse use cases across a plethora of digital mediums. It is limited however to only one retailer’s circular/FSI data set at a time.
- SmartCircular API – SCAPI – This is an API that offers that was built specifically to enable the building of an online circular web site. It is also limited however to only one retailer’s circular/FSI data set at a time.
- SmartBrand API – SBAPI – This is an API that is all about enabling cross-retailer searching and browsing for a pre-selected list of one or more brands/manufactures.
- ShopLocal Cross-Retailer API – SCRAPI – This API allows for all retailers content of any type to be browsed and searched across.
- ShopLocal API – SLAPI – This is a somewhat older API that offers access to a limited set of content which includes some premade ROP or FSI ad viewer widgets (JSON type HTML widget) and some ROP and FSI keyword search capabilities.
- Local Offer Management System API – LOMS API – This is the API that sits behind the new, very flexible local offer management system which allows advertisers (such as local Pepsi Bottlers or Lexus Tier 1) to retrieve product, store/dealer, offer or retailer data in a systematic way.
And yes, it’s somewhat confusing and there is tons of overlap between the different, poorly named APIs. The long terms vision is to fold all of these into one super-powerful global API that allows a user to access any type of content from any content silo. One day…
To help drive awareness and traffic to local market ROP advertisers, Canwest and ShopLocal are launching a new a new product called ‘Zoom To My Ad’. Essentially this expandable Adobe Flex based display ad grabs a set of random ROP advertisers to feature every single impression that it is served. It was built in a way to use the standard IAB display ad inventory, which will allow Canwest to serve these ‘Zoom To My Ad’ promotions through their standard publisher ad server.
Unexpanded leaderboard featuring a random selection of ROP ads for a specific Canwest newspaper web site
Expanded leaderboard which dynamically re-sizes its vertical dimension to adjust to the size & format of the ROP ad that is being "zoomed" to
So what does one learn by processing of all the print ads for the top 100 or so US retailers? Quite a lot about the makeup of a circular ad. For example, during the one year period from 9/1/2008 thru 8/31/2009 ShopLocal found that the:
ShopLocal has the unique ability to measure and trend the volume, depth and frequency of retail newspaper print advertising.
- Number of listings per promotion was on average: 137 (median = 99)
- Number of listings per promotional page was on average: 11.6 (median = 10)
- Number of overall pages per promotion was on average: 15.3 (median = 9 & mode = 9.5)
- Number of versions per promotion was on average: 17.3 (median = 3 & mode = 1)
- By converting a decent chunk of non-versioned content (e.g., catalogs), this is why the mode is 1
- Number of promotions per year per retailer was on average: 88.5 (median = 49 & mode = 9)
- By processing some catalogs, this is why the mode was 9 as some retailers that use catalogs only put out a few larger books per year
- Number of days that a promotion is live was on average: 30.3 (median = 9 & mode = 7)
- For most typical Sunday newspaper type circulars, the typical sale spans 7 days – Sunday thru Saturday
- English language promotions make up about 93%, Spanish contributes 6% and French contributes 2%
- Circular type promotions make up 84% of the overall ad volume and the rest is split between catalogs (7%), guides (1%) mailers (1%), ROP ads (1%) and other (6%)
I’m looking forward on doing some more analysis with the awesome heavy lifting that our in-house analytics team provides to help trend these stats against historical data going back to 1999 so as to gauge the level of print promotion decline that seems to be discussed frequently in the media lately. My hypothesis is that the decline will be very minimal at best and limited to certain retail industry segments.
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.
Wow. Talk about coming full circle. Here is what this new reverse run of press (ROP for short – these are the ads that are published in-line within newspaper content and not inserted like a circular/flyer/FSI) ad publishing product is all about.
- Step #1: Print Circulars All ShopLocal content begins first as print circulars. Typically this equates to starting life as a multi-page, multi-layer, HiRes Adobe PDF file. The same asset that is sent to a commercial grade printer to mass produce say 50,000,000 (yes million) copies on any given Sunday.
- Step #2: Digital Circulars From here, this print PDF is broken down (or decomposed) into many unique individual parts and stored in a relational database that ShopLocal hosts. At this point, the local promotional (e.g., circular) content is fully digital and easily distributed via whole hosts of digital mediums including search, display, mobile, widget, microsite, etc.
- Step #3: Crowd Sourced Popularity This digital circular content is displayed to hundreds of thousands or up to millions in some cases of in-market local shoppers within the advertisers SmartCircular (or online weekly ad) site. The result of all this exposure and consumer interaction is amazing insights into what products and offers are the most popular. ShopLocal calls this ranking data the Wisdom of the Crowds. This crowd sourced popularity data is then used to filter out all of the products that the large audience did NOT find engaging or interesting. Rather, only the most engaging circular content makes it to the last step of this process.
- Step #4: Print ROP Ads The most popular circular content (as determined by the advertiser’s own customers) is then inserted into a pre-defined and pre-approved print ROP ad template. The combination of these “best of the best” local promotional offers combined with the great reach of the newspaper is what makes this a recipe for success.
So in summary from print (circular) ads all the way back to print (ROP) ads. That is essentially the life cycle of the circular content for this product.
This is the core problem that reverse ROP publishing solves. A print Sunday circular ad quickly gets tossed in the trash can / recycle bin by Monday or so which leaves a real hole as far as ongoing reach and distribution for the advertiser. By inserting targeted and timely ROP ads back into the newspaper, the advertiser is able to reach these shoppers at the right time when shopping activity is starting to pick back up on the days leading up to the weekend - Thursday or Friday.
Enough talk. Time to show everyone a few samples of what this type of advertising is all about – see the two (2) below. To better define reverse ROP ads, they can be:
- Geo-targeted by unique newspaper and print version. So in Gannett’s case, there are over 80 unique local newspapers to choose from. This helps ensure that the same print versioning (eg price and product assortments) that are created and applied to the print circular content can and will be re-applied to the creation and placement of these reverse ROP ads
- Flexible in the number of products shown within the ROP ad template (the template however needs to be consistent from market to market and week to week)
- Flexible in the ROP ad dimensions (height & width)
- Flexible in the placement within the local newspapers
- Able to be distributed on either the Thursday or Friday following the typical Sunday circular ad drop / newspaper insertion
- Circular products for inclusion into these reverse ROP ads can be chosen based upon:
- Wisdom of the Crowd (WoC) popularity
- Front circular page / back circular page location
- Category of the items (which would allow for some level of contextual targeting – combining let’s say the category content within “LCD / Plasma TVs” with the “Sports” section placement of the ROP ad)
- Brand of the items
- Additional filters that can be applied to the above content selection logic include
- Item price (so for example exclusing all the items under $5.00 regardless of popularity)
- Item sale end date (no sense advertising products that will for example not be on sale very shortly)
Here is a real reverse ROP ad that Gannett created for Best Buy and ran across a handful of it's top local newspapers. This is an ongoing process on a weekly basis to turn the digital circular content into a print ROP ad
Here is a standard reverse ROP "template" that Gannett uses to showcase the overall product concept
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