The future of advertising
A recent JCDecaux ad in Sydney's Martin Place used NFC technology to transfer promotional material directly to an interested person's smartphone.
BUS stop touch screens, footpath-level digital games and cinema picture walls are set to revolutionise street advertising in Australia.
Interactive advertising can invite consumers to try out smartphone apps on screens in the street, order goods after hours by tapping a transparent shop window screen, and view stock on an enormous 2.7m-long touch sensitive table at shopping centres.
Interactive ads also will open the world of viral online marketing campaigns to street advertisers by letting people share product likes and dislikes with friends on social networks while at a bus stop shelter.
Outdoor advertising corporation JCDecaux, which has about 3000 advertising structures in Australia, cited pedestrian walkways, bus stops and transit locations such as railway station as places where the public eventually will interact with advertising.
JCDecaux Australia chief executive Steve O'Connor said the coming breed of near field communication (NFC) added another dimension to interactive advertising by allowing people to simply tap their phone on ads to download product information and media.
NFC advertising specialist Tapit has been leading the charge with campaigns for Nova Radio, the Queen Victoria Building shopping centre and the Ten Network's The Renovators with NFC-enabled street advertising.
Chief executive Jamie Conyngham said NFC tags were placed behind the ad glass.
A tap on the Nova Radio ad would cause radio to livestream to the phone, The Renovators ad would see daily program content delivered to the phone, while tapping the QVB ad would enter the owner in a competition to win $5000 of shopping. The admittedly experimental use of NFC-enabled ads was successful, despite the lack of NFC-enabled phones on the Australian market, Mr Conyngham said.
They were, however, confined to one Nokia, Samsung and Huawei handsets until the next wave of new phones was released.
Mr O'Connor said JCDecaux were about to establish two networks of NFC-enabled advertising signs across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
The Sydney-based marketing agency The Creative Shop, meanwhile, is readying for its rollout next month of ads at JCDecaux locations that employ touch-sensitive screens.
"What people are going to see come October moving forwards is more advertising they can actually engage with through touch, feel, sounds, driving engagement," Creative Shop director Brian Smillie said.
He said eight panels would be rolled out in Sydney, three in Brisbane and a couple in Melbourne. One would be in Sydney's Martin Place.
"Basically, consumers will walk pass a traditional JCDecaux advertising box (and) within that box we'll have a 55-inch LCD panel which will have a very strong call-to-action offering you a chance to win, touch here," Mr Smillie said.
Panels would link users to their Facebook account, they'd have an ability to capture a consumer's email address, and capture the data of a consumer who plays a product-based game, he said.
They could be mailed a chance to win a product, and through sharing the application with friends at street level on Facebook, they would have more chances to win.
In February, Mr Smillie and Creative Shop managing director Mark Bailey formed a partnership with digital marketing agency iPartners of Korea, where touch-screen advertising is becoming common.
Creative Shop also is promoting transparent touch screens that can be mounted in shop windows.
When switched off, they are invisible. Switched on, they display a computer's screen contents. For marketing, that means inventory and sales programs.
Mr Bailey said shoppers could check out item catalogues from the shop window, and after hours, even order goods they saw on display.
"If someone's going to a shopping mall, going to the movies that night, walks past a shop front window, says I really like that product and want to engage with it, but the shop's not open, I'd actually like to come back and make that purchase, you can actually connect to an online store and complete the transaction that way," Mr Bailey said.
The 22-, 26- and 46-inch screens are in their infancy and to date are being sold encased in boxes that promote in-store merchandise.
Interactive table tops are another means of promoting stock inventory and sales. Microsoft's Surface coffee table has been a pioneer as an integrated hardware and software solution.
Users interact with content using table-top gestures, but at $US12,500 ($12.205) each they are expensive, and while Microsoft does not reveal national sales of Surface, it is believed relatively few sold here.
One of its first clients, ANZ Bank, last year conducted trials of three Surface tables for private banking, and deployed a Surface table at the Australian Open tennis tournament in Melbourne. The bank would not comment on their success or otherwise.
However, it is understood using Surface to show customers marketing scenarios can be achieved with far less expensive tablet computers.
The Creative Shop said it was building largish in-house touch-screen tables -- 2.7m long by 1.2m wide -- for use in shopping centres.
"We can have six individual people playing with six individual pieces of content at any one time, capable of handling six interactions at once," Mr Smillie said.
"One person can be searching for shoes for his wife, while another is searching for the cinema opening hours and another booking a restaurant for friends -- all at the same time from the same table.
"You can send information to them -- you can attach Google maps, a reservation number, all those sort of things."
While not a fan of Microsoft's Surface hardware, the Creative Shop is certainly a fan when it comes to Microsoft's most innovative offering, Kinect.
The company employs a Kinect programmer capable of adapting it, and with the recent release of the Kinect Beta software development kit (SDK), sees a future in gestures being available for the public to interact with street signage.
Mr Smillie cited the example of an advertisement on a wall for an Indiana Jones movie. A consumer could stand in front of the ad and gesture to transform into characters in the film."They can share that to their smart device or their tablet, or send it to Facebook or email, and they've got a reference."
AMP Capital Shopping Centres head of marketing and communications Stuart Langeveldt cited a virtual supermarket in a South Korean subway as an example of things to come. Customers could view products, scan a QR code, buy displayed goods with their mobile phone and have them delivered home.
Interactive ads gave an immediate competitive advantage, Mr Langeveldt said. "Retailers are a bit slow in adopting these technologies, but customers want it."
Melanie Ingrey, research director of media at Nielsen, said research showed the execution of interactive ad campaigns needed to be well-targeted, and the interactive offerings relevant to the consumer.
"Increasingly in this market, it is consumers under 24," she said. "They're confident in engaging with content and they often show a lot more openness and tolerance, whereas older consumers are more cynical."