It’s not just Santa Claus who’s coming to town this Christmas. His extra helper is called digital-POS. It’s also making a list and checking it twice, and checking whether your smartphone is sleeping or awake. The twist is that you get to decide if you’ve been good enough for presents, although some tailored advertising and discounts ought to help you decide!
Many major retail outlets now feature digital-POS screens to engage with passing shoppers, but d-POS can deliver so much more. Imagine a tailored customer journey, all the way from the bus shelter ad to the till, via a smartphone and beacons, where an in-store d-POS display personally welcomes consumers and rewards them.
The seamless experience could guide the consumer to the nearest store better than Rudolf. What’s required is some joined-up thinking. DOOH and d-POS may appear in different company budgets or balance sheets, but as far as the consumer is concerned multimedia is a contradiction – for them it’s a single, continuous experience. They don’t care about platforms; they care about content, relevance and engagement.
The data is already out there, waiting to be unwrapped. Pizza Hut created ‘the world’s first Subconscious Menu’, thanks to d-POS and eye tracking software. How long before a brand makes the next logical leap and produces ‘the Subconscious Shopping List’, triggered by engagement with an initial ad and developed by a combination of previous purchases and the walk to the shop?
That degree of data sharing will require a new digital marketplace – nuanced NDAs, shared data and aligned governance. It might also mean mergers, takeovers or strategic alliances where there are clear cost benefits. The business intellgence will need to evolve too in order to analyse cross-platform and cross-technology information, changing the way data is currently stored, processed and segmented. There’s still time to add extra server space to your Christmas list!