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The Perspective |
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Friday, 04 September 2009
Product packaging is a powerful and effective means of communicating a product’s potential, promise and desirability to consumers. There’s no argument about that. However, product packaging is a little overworked these days — a package must clearly list ingredients, nutrition facts, instructions for use, safety information, consumer hotlines, and make room for a bar code. And all of this is before the important stuff! It must also do a stellar job of displaying its brand, attract consumers and make them desire the product — and do this better than every other product package within view.
Until recently, product packaging has been pretty much up to the task of delivering all that is asked of it. But, with bigger stores carrying ever-larger assortments, packages need to shout louder to be heard over the competition. Compounding this problem is the admirable drive to reduce packaging, which finds manufacturers with less package ‘real estate’ to use for messaging. In some cases, there is no package to use for messaging (think bicycles or car tires) — just a tiny shelf tag to tell the story. And if your product package can’t tell its story, your product won’t make it into the cart. Consider that a recent Miller Zell study shows that 60 percent of purchase decisions are made right there in the aisle.
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Interactive media systems bring products to life. Video games locked in display cases are replaced with on-demand trailers, searchable extended inventory and instant pre-ordering.
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It’s no surprise then that we’re seeing an increasing number of retailers and brands using in-store interactive media systems to help their overworked product packaging. Interactive touchscreens offer near-infinite real estate in a compact space, which makes it possible to provide in-depth technical information, to show product demonstration videos or simply tell a product’s story. The feel-good origins of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream or the quest for innovation that led to Dyson vacuum cleaners make for compelling "aisle theatre," and are sometimes just the things that cement purchase decisions.
Another retail trend I see is the inclusion of extended inventories — products which are merchandized in the store, but only available online or via ship-to-store delivery for later pickup. This trend brings the best of web shopping to the brick-and-mortar store, but often comes without all the great sorting and filtering tools the web provides to make sense of all this choice.
Think of digital cameras, or other technical products that require some consideration like golf clubs, laptop computers or even baby carriers. Without a knowledgeable sales associate and only a shelf tag to do the talking, retailers are increasingly turning to in-store interactive screens. These assistive shopping systems guide consumers through the selection process and provide independent user ratings, product reviews, and even price comparisons. The trend toward these systems is growing, as it is preferable to maintain a single, accurate product decision tree, than to train thousands of store associates on the intricacies of a dozen or more high-touch product lines.
Looking to the future of in-store interactive systems, it’s clear the gel has not set — retailers are still discovering new ways of mixing packaging and interactive technology to connect with consumers. Decades from now when computing is truly ubiquitous, and packages are literally alive with moving images, every container could be in itself an interactive experience. Until that future arrives, in-store interactive systems may be the best way to think outside the package.
Monday, 28 April 2008
Some go to Las Vegas to get married or to gamble. I go to Vegas to renew my kiosk vows at the annual convention and KioskCom Awards event. On my return from Vegas, I rushed backed from New York’s JFK airport in order to avoid the traffic gridlock posed by the visit by the Pope and to see the new Microsoft Surface installation at the AT&T phone store.
The much-anticipated Microsoft Surface touch table landed at five AT&T stores this week in New York, Atlanta, San Antonio and San Francisco.
Much has been written in the trade press about the production delays. It appears that it had to do with Microsoft running a Betty Crocker Bake-off contest between the original partner, T-mobile and AT&T Mobility.
AT&T won and my congrats to Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO, AT&T Mobility for understanding what it takes to win in today’s competitive environment. (You may recall that AT&T also was the first partner with Apple’s iPhone.)
You can see how the MS Surface application works at the AT&T site by clicking here.
How do I like it?
I’ve been excited by multi-touch technology ever since I saw Jeff Han’s video (now used by CNN Political TV coverage). Not a lot has been written about some of the pioneering competitive technology created by GestureTeks MultiTouch Application or Savant’s AV control touch table. Again, Microsoft has borrowed inventions from other industry innovators and sewn together an affordable, commercially available hardware and software product offering. The Apple iPhone interface also raised the bar on consumer interactive applications.
What is the secret to the AT&T Surface Application?
It’s not about the technology. It’s about the creative application, fused with savvy in-store merchandising skills. The AT&T and Microsoft team (and perhaps a few clever contractors), produced a kiosk application that provides real value to consumers and store associates. The AT&T store salesperson was able to demonstrate dozens of different phone configurations, colors and coverage maps in a matter of seconds—without giving me 5 different paper brochures.
How will this change the kiosk world?
I’ve been involved in this industry for over two decades and love to innovate. And as founder of Netkey and Managing Director of SMP, I’ve worked on over 200 interactive kiosk projects around the world.
The AT&T Surface installation will change the kiosk world.
No longer will your customers want simple kiosk pedestals or wall mounted units. Your customers will request the amazing features of MS Surface: Multi-touch, product tag initiated information, relevant digital merchandising interfaces — in table top or wall mounted configurations.
My advice to my kiosk colleagues? Turn off your computers, get out of the office and take your entire team to visit an AT&T store to play with the MS Surface Application. Follow Microsoft’s example: Don’t copy, but instead enhance and improve on their application for your own specific industry market, and you just might beat them.
Or you might want to leapfrog Microsoft and start thinking about mobile devices. The Apple iPhone, with its rich, multi-touch interface, may be the next battleground for the in-store customer.
Technology will always change every 90 days, but I can safely make predictions about who will win the KioskCom 2009 Best of Show Award, the NRF Best of Show Award, GlobalShop Best of Shop or any other retail merchandising award category. And the winner is, AT&T Mobility.
Monday, 14 April 2008
As the owner of a company that publishes kiosk system software and develops custom self-service kiosk applications, it has been interesting to me to watch the convergence of the digital signage and self-service kiosk industries. Although kiosks are typically designed for interactivity and digital signage is not, it is apparent to me that the kiosk industry has a lot to offer to digital signage.
Digital signage gives the opportunity for signage to evolve from static to dynamic; static branding can become animated, a static advertisement can become a video commercial, maps can be instantly updated with latest information, and current news can be easily displayed. Perhaps most importantly, content can be readily modified.
With the convergence of digital signage and self-service kiosks, now dynamic digital signage can become interactive. Self-service kiosk applications exist to provide a seamless user interface, enabling a kiosk user to perform a task. Similarly, the digital ad that draws a user to the kiosk can now be extended to enable the user to find out more information about the product and ultimately place an order. Or, a user can drill into a ticker tape news item and read the complete story. The ability to make digital signage interactive enables more information to be transferred ultimately improving the ROI of the deployment.
The first inkling of things to come occurred several years ago when LCD display prices dropped to enable kiosks to economically have second monitors – typically a big, beautiful widescreen LCD mounted above the kiosk. This gave the kiosk deployer an interesting choice. The second monitor could be used to enhance and expand the functionality of the application running on the primary monitor - for example, by providing context sensitive help, displaying detailed product information, or providing additional dynamic branding for the kiosk. Or, the second monitor could be used as an independent revenue stream by selling advertising.
Whereas, advertising had long been sold for display on a kiosk’s primary screen especially for display during periods of inactivity, the second monitor enabled constant advertising exposure and most importantly during periods of kiosk activity, when a potential customer is at the kiosk and most ready to be influenced.
Interactive Pandora’s Box
While making digital signage interactive has many obvious benefits, it also opens up many self-service kiosk issues that need to be addressed. The most important include the need for the user to be kept away from the operating system and network, to clear the user’s confidential information, and to reset the application after the user leaves. These are significant requirements to add to a digital signage application but fortunately long ago solved by the kiosk industry, so there is no need to reinvent the wheel.
As with self-service kiosks, the only thing worse than having a digital signage installation broken down, is not knowing your digital signage installation is broken down. ROI is a key determinant of the success of a project and when a kiosk or digital signage unit is sitting with a dark screen, ROI plummets. Fortunately, the kiosk industry has a solution whereby the kiosk regularly pings a centralized server saying ‘Here I am alive and well’ and typically sends a statistical snapshot of its health for proof. When a kiosk stops pinging, the centralized server sends out the alarm. The technology is readily transferable to a digital signage installation.
Similarly, the nature of digital signage is one of dynamic content and the requirement for content to change regularly. Depending on the complexity and size of the digital content and the quality of the internet connection, content can be hosted either locally at the digital signage location or at a remote server. When content is hosted locally, there needs to be a robust method to update content. Once again, this dilemma has been resolved within the kiosk industry, and the technology is readily transferable to a digital signage installation.
Not just a one-way street
Lest one believe that only the kiosk industry has technology to share with digital signage, the digital signage industry has helped the kiosk industry in at least one way by popularizing the concept of a computer on a wall. The first digital signage implementations were generally a display unit hooked up to a DVD player or to a closed circuit media network, but especially with the advent of PCs small enough to be packaged onto the back of a display unit, digital signage displays are more commonly PC driven which receive content directly from the Internet. Similarly, self service kiosk applications are increasingly either wall mounted or desktop displays instead of being floor mounted, thus freeing up valuable floor space and increasing viable installation locations.
One source of instability that plagues both kiosk self-service and digital signage is the quality of digital media players. Whereas the typical industry standard media player was designed for a user sitting at their desk playing a video file over a relatively short period of time, the media player in a kiosk or digital signage application must play a video for an extended period of time, perhaps measured in months.
Many industry standard media players and/or codecs are not up to the task of extended play. They tend to leak memory and resources in a manner that a user sitting at their desk would not notice, but can bring a kiosk or digital signage application to its knees over an extended period of time. In the kiosk industry, sophisticated kiosk system software monitors these applications and when necessary restarts the application or reboots the computer; however, the user experience of having an application freeze due to depleted system resources, then get restarted by the kiosk system software is not ideal, and it would be far better for everyone involved if the industry’s media players/codecs were better written.
In summary, as digital signage applications move toward increasing interactivity, I believe the self-service kiosk industry has a lot to offer the digital signage industry and the convergence of solutions is a positive step forward for both industries.
Tuesday, 08 January 2008
Bill Gerba, president of WireSpring Technologies, regularly blogs about digital signage at Wirespring.com. The following column first appeared on that site here.
Happy New Year, folks. Here's to a happy, healthy and prosperous 2008 for all. For many, the new year brings with it connotations of renewal, a fresh start, infinite possibilities... and zillions of blog posts with top-10 lists and predictions for the coming months. While I'm as much an optimist as the next guy (oh, stop laughing already), I'm not much for making predictions. Maybe it's because I recognize the futility of trying to do the impossible. Maybe I don't want to trap WireSpring in a self-fulfilling prophecy that belies its full potential. Or maybe it's just because I'm always wrong. But regardless of the underlying cause, I'm not kicking off the first post of 2008 with some corny industry predictions. Instead, today I want to talk about the innovation (or lack thereof) taking place in the kiosk and digital signage markets.
Admittedly, talking about innovation itself isn't very innovative -- I actually got the idea from this month's HUB magazine, which focuses on marketing innovation. As Editor-in-Chief Tim Manners quips, "talking about innovation is kind of like the marketing equivalent of talking about the weather. You know the old joke: Everybody talks about the weather but nobody ever does anything about it." Whether looking at marketing in general or the tiny microcosm of digital out-of-home media like kiosks and digital signage, I think Manners' observation holds true. There's certainly a lot of activity in the marketplace right now, both for interactive kiosks and non-interactive digital signage. But does any of it show the hallmarks of innovation? Does anything out there today make it past the "Gee, that's a neat demo" phase into the "Duh, now why didn't I think of that?" territory that so often marks a truly innovative idea? I can't think of a single thing in the last twelve months that's firmly planted in the latter category, though a few come close. For example:
Not very innovative - New and different form factors: 2007 saw the aggressive expansion of one company's interactive digital signage installations in taxis, on buildings, in public toilets and urinals, on the floor, on the ceiling, and even mounted on people. Are any of these ideas interesting? Sure, they all are. Are they truly innovative? Not in my book. Unique signage placement, even when bundled with (or reliant upon) a unique business model, hasn't solved any of our well-known industry-wide problems, nor has it opened up (or created) significant new markets or otherwise advanced the state of the industry. Likewise, when highly-touted OLED and electronic paper technology makes new screen shapes and mounting options available in a few years, they may offer significant technological innovations, but little industry innovation.
Somewhat innovative - DS that appeals to more than one sense: And throwing up a pair of speakers to complement your hanging LCD screen isn't what I'm talking about. The past couple of years saw some interesting ideas come to light, though. In particular, directional sound came of age, with Wal-Mart Mexico deploying something like 5,000 hypersonic sound speakers to reduce employee fatigue and improve audio targeting in their digital signage network back in late 2006. (Full disclosure: Wal-Mart Mexico is one of our customers.) Since then, a number of other large deployments have followed suit. Directional sound represents not only technological innovation (which has been in the works for years, of course), but also a solution to problems that previously plagued installations. 2007 also marked the advent of scent marketing, with Japan's NTT testing a digital sign platform that could match specific scents with audio and video promotions. I don't think this tech is quite ready for prime-time, but it has a lot of potential for driving sales of food, drinks, perfume, and other products where smell is a big part of the customer experience.
A little more innovative - Interactive store windows: Although it only spanned a few locations, the interactive store window deployment at Ralph Lauren Polo stores this year scored some major headlines, not only in the interactive kiosk circuit but also in weighty, mainstream publications like the Wall Street Journal. On the surface, it looked quite innovative: a huge, dynamic screen that users could interact with simply by touching the store window. In reality though, the true innovation was smaller: let passers-by shop the store after hours. That particular piece has been done many times before, and in a number of different ways -- just think ATMs. Still, it brought the solution to 5th avenue and the New York Open, garnered some positive press for the self-service industry, and from a technical standpoint was visually stunning. Still, we've encountered through-glass touchscreens and rear-projection onto storefront windows a number of times before, so I'd have to say that the combination of these elements was clever and eye-catching, but not something I'd call highly innovative.
Quite innovative - The rise of ad aggregators: In an attempt to solve one of the biggest problems plaguing the ad-driven digital signage community, companies like SeeSaw Networks, Adcentricity and Artisan Live started working on ways to make buying time on screen networks easy for media planners and buyers. While each company has some successes to talk about, we're still a ways away from a digital signage media buy being as foolproof as it needs to be in order to see mass adoption over on Madison Ave (if in fact that would ever happen, and it probably wouldn't). Still, each of these companies (and others, I'm sure) are introducing unique solutions to a highly complex problem, and while the overall concept of "Let's take a bunch of little networks and sell them like one big one" might seem obvious, I'm sure it's quite the colossal undertaking, requiring all sorts of business, finance and technical acumen.
Most innovative yet - Direct feedback/interaction via mobile phones: It certainly wasn't invented in 2007, and it might even be old hat by now, but every time I see a particularly well-done piece of content that has a call to action featuring an SMS coupon or feedback form, I'm impressed. This technique addresses one of the most difficult problems for digital signage vendors: proving out an ROI. With a direct feedback mechanism, advertisers have an accurate gauge of how many people actually were engaged by their ads, and they even have the opportunity to collect some information about them. For viewers who aren't interested, there's no negative consequence. For those who are, participation is just a text message away. Considering the mobile phone and SMS penetration rate in the industrialized world, very few are excluded. Of course, the method isn't perfect: it still requires some effort on the user's part, and it doesn't do anything to address those individuals who were engaged, but not enough to whip out their mobile. But of all the solutions I've seen so far for measuring engaged audiences, this is my favorite.
All considered, this year is likely to bring many incremental improvements to the solutions I've covered above, and that's a good thing. Part of becoming a mature industry is realizing that it's not always necessary to reinvent the wheel. In fact, the best approach is often to learn from (and work from) the accomplishments of others. But there's always the chance that we'll see some real innovation happening -- solutions to the "big problems" that we all face every day: calculating ROI, measuring impact (heck, merely defining "impact" would be great), engaging more viewers, and delivering messages to those viewers effectively.
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