Tag: ipg media lab

A GPS to navigate your supermarket

Posted on by Lab Team

It’s easy enough to use GPS to get from your house to a supermarket, but how about a GPS that can locate the products you want once you’re in that supermarket?

Today, midwest supermarket chain Meijer launched a mobile application called “Find-It,” which helps shoppers navigate the shelves of four of it’s biggest Michigan stores. The program includes a database of 100,000 products and also directs consumers to the supermarket’s most enticing promotional offers and sale items.

The app runs on the iPhone, iPhone Touch, and Android devices, and was built by Point Inside– a company that until now built its business on apps mapping interiors of large airports and malls throughout the country. Point Inside’s maps utilize interactive touch screens, and typically help consumers find specific stores, as well as rest rooms, escalators, and various interior points of interest. Continue reading “A GPS to navigate your supermarket”

WSJ: New technology lures shoppers to stores

Posted on by Lab Team

Originally published by the WSJ:

Marketing companies are experimenting with a new wave of digital technologies to pitch to consumers while they shop: interactive dressing-room mirrors, kiosks with virtual customer-service representatives, and shopping carts and digital scanners that offer personalized discounts.

These futuristic technologies are among the interactive tools on display at Interpublic Group of Cos.’ new retail center at the advertising company’s Media Lab in Los Angeles.

There, Interpublic is testing innovative ways for marketers to connect with customers as part of an effort to better understand what makes consumers buy and to encourage companies to rethink their approaches to the role of the retail store.

Read the full story on wsj.com and see the WSJ video below.

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Did Google abandon net neutrality?

Posted on by Lab Team

As a former Google employee, I always took the “Don’t Be Evil” mantra as a sincere gesture to be taken with a grain of salt.  The slogan was a reminder of the company’s humble and idealistic beginnings, but not an iron-clad indication of its post-IPO mindset.  After all, a corporation open to accommodating censorship in China is willing to put practical limits on principles that hit the bottom line too hard.

Many long-time Google advocates were surprised and disappointed with last week’s Google/Verizon net neutrality proposal, and I was among them.  While the company defends the move as a necessary practical decision given political realities, it in many ways marks the completion of Google’s gradual transition from wunderkind start-up to new-millennium corporate superpower.   Continue reading “Did Google abandon net neutrality?”

Data is the new black….cyan, magenta, and yellow

Posted on by Lab Team

Historically, ads have been closed systems. The information contained in the ad itself is fixed. Most of the interactivity in digital ads to date has been limited to the ability to link somewhere or to engage with content elements that were included in the unit at the time it was trafficked. But anyone who has ever looked at billboard that had a clock or thermometer knows the power of real time information to capture attention.
There is a new generation of rich media providers who now enable advertisers to pipe up-to-the-moment content into digital display ads. The number of data sources available by API is growing every day – weather, traffic conditions, UV index, Tweets, Facebook updates, you name it! The next generation rich media companies are working hard to make it easy for advertisers to incorporate these feeds while assuring the ads never break.
Continue reading “Data is the new black….cyan, magenta, and yellow”

The evolution of America’s Internet activity

Posted on by Lab Team

Nielsen released new statistics this week on Americans’ online behavior that confirms the growing dominance of social networking while illuminating strong differences in computer and mobile activity. This data gives powerful insight into patterns in consumer behavior and how advertisers fit into that equation.

According to the report, social networking now accounts for 22.7% of total U.S. Internet time, an impressive growth from its 15.8% share in 2009. Online gaming also moved into the number two spot at 10.2%, overtaking E-mail which had the steepest decline in share– retreating from 11.5% to 8.3%. Other emerging categories include Videos/Movies, while those like Portals and Entertainment seem to be waning.

In stark contrast, Nielsen’s survey indicates that E-Mail is still the dominant online activity for mobile, accounting for over 40% of time. Portals came in second for, followed by social networking at a close third. The biggest mobile growth sectors are Music and Videos/Movies (20% growth each year over year), while News/Current Events and Sports each dropped precipitously. Continue reading “The evolution of America’s Internet activity”

Library of Congress breaks the iPhone tether

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Want to override your iPhone’s system controls? Now there’s an app for that. Thanks to Monday’s Library of Congress ruling allowing the “jailbreaking” of iPhones, users can now legally override Apple’s operating system to allow third party applications. In weighing certain exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the LOC gave four basic “fair use” arguments for siding with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and against Apple:

1. Jailbreakers are modifying a device they own for private, noncommercial purposes
2. Operating systems customarily enable third party programs and doing so on the iPhone doesn’t infringe on exclusive Apple copyrights
3. The amount of recoding performed during a jailbreak is negligible– 50 bytes of code out of a total of over 8 million
4. Jailbreaking doesn’t devalue Apple’s firmware or iPhones in the marketplace and might even help it by allowing users a wider variety of app choices

The Library of Congress’ explanations confirm what is apparent to most– that Apple’s real reason for exerting absolute control over it’s iPhones and App Store is to strengthen it’s bottom line without regard for what consumers want. Despite a respectful tone, the LOC’s message to Apple is clear: there is no legal basis for this kind of exclusivity, and we won’t do your dirty work by agreeing to this logic. Continue reading “Library of Congress breaks the iPhone tether”

Making shopping a science

Posted on by Lab Team

This month, along with the announcement of our retail alliance with AOL, Mediabrands unveiled of a new shopper market agency called Shopper Sciences. Retail veteran and Mediabrands EVP, John Ross will head the agency which will focus on the key influence factors in shoppers’ journey from undecided to decided.

Utilizing a range of tools from across Mediabrands, and relying heavily on the Lab, the new shopper marketing agency will have the ability to pinpoint the media sources that move a shopper from indecision to decision, evaluate the barriers to purchase at different points within the purchase cycle.   The agency will use influence research to reveal points where the shopping process fails to meet consumers’ needs.  By also partnering with Geomentum it will provide clients with location-based insights and customer traffic to retail locations.

The Lab sat down with John Ross to discuss the future of the Shopper Sciences Agency. Continue reading “Making shopping a science”

App vs. WebApp: A philosophical difference

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App vs WebApp (Chrome/iTunes)Last week two items of note occurred. Apple released the iPad, and Google announced they would be building Flash into Chrome and Chrome OS. These two announcements highlight a growing difference between Apple and Google’s strategies for the future of computing. Both agree it’s mobile, but they have strong differing opinions on the issue of App vs WebApp.

Apple has had an interesting evolution. When the iPhone OS was first released, Apple staunchly positioned it as web apps only, with no native applications allowed. Eventually, after a small community of hackers got apps to work on the phones and even created a single app to find, download, and update their apps, Apple caved in. We then got a SDK for native applications, and finally arrived in the age of “There’s an App for that.” The iPad as a device is the epitome of this mentality. The iPad is about taking experiences that live elsewhere, whether Netflix or the New York Times, and creating an even better, completely customized experience for a single device. It’s all about the apps. Continue reading “App vs. WebApp: A philosophical difference”

Will brand sponsorship bring back music videos?

Posted on by Lab Team

Dr Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (OK Go and State Farm)For most bands in the slumping music industry, the day of big budget videos is a luxury of the past.  But last week undisputed kings of the viral music video, OK GO, found a new avenue to make their art a reality: corporate sponsorship.

The band’s clip for “This Too Shall Pass,” which features a mind blowing two story Rube Goldberg contraption, was bank rolled by none other than State Farm Insurance.  In a brilliant move, the band also arranged the deal so that State Farm paid for the right to make the YouTube clip embeddable anywhere on the web.  The band’s singer Damian Kulash recently wrote a piece for The New York Times questioning EMI’s decision not to allow embedding of YouTube videos and State Farm graciously presented a work around solution.

This is the first example of prominent corporate sponsorship of a major music video that we know of and State Farm’s bet has paid off handsomely– the clip received close to a million views a day in the first week of launch.  The video includes a toy car with the State Farm logo as well as a State Farm teddy bear and a closing thank you to the brand for making the video possible. Continue reading “Will brand sponsorship bring back music videos?”

Game marketing lessons from retailers

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Ubisoft Montreal/Target Column originally featured on MediaPost

There’s a recent trend among video game retailers that’s worthy of note for brand marketers. For a while now, retailers such as GameStop have been offering exclusive extras for their customers. These premiums were typically small tchotchkes, small inexpensive trinkets. But now we’re seeing this trend extend into the realm of downloadable content.

I recently returned from a vacation to Italy, where I saw the Palazzo Medici — an exquisite palace built during the Renaissance by Florence’s resident ruling family. If I want to access the Palazzo in Ubisoft’s upcoming game “Assassin’s Creed 2,” I’ll have to purchase the title from GameStop. This is hardly the only instance of this type of promotion. Read more.