Fra il dire e il fare c’e’ di mezzo il mare.
An ocean lies between what is said and what is done.
Behavioral Analytics Data for Email Campaigns
March 11, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Here’s a great opportunity to learn about leveraging data for more successful email campaigns. If you’re a member of the American Marketing Association, you should have received an email invitation to attend a webinar entitled “Using Web Behavior Data to Drive Follow Up Messaging.”
This is a terrific chance to learn from a vendor, Lyris, about how data mining can be used in conjunction with CRM tools to launch better B2C email efforts. Plan on making Thursday, March 13th, 2008 a “brown bag” lunch in front of your computer.
The Lighter/Darker Side of Net-Centric Marketing
March 10, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Back in December, The Marketing Consigliere blogged about the “Do Not Track” movement and how it was not good for B2C business (Do Not Resuscitate “Do Not Track” Part I & Part II). While he was critical of the privacy interest groups, he does have a sense of humor and admires their depiction of privacy intrusion in a Flash video he stumbled on the at the ACLU website. It portrays the CRM GUI of an order taker at a place called “Pizza Palace.”
With tongue-in-cheek irony, they illustrate the intrusive nickel and diming that a customer may suffer should marketers be allowed to collect business intelligence and perform over-the-top data mining and predictive analysis. He admits he laughed at the scenario.
His thoughts: While it’s technically feasible, it’s further off than they’re trying to make us fear. The integration of those disparate data points are probably not in even the most enthusiastic of Net-Centric Marketers’ heads. While many would like to have a EMM platform of that capability, the everyday worries of marketing tools such as advertising to even get a single customer still weigh heavily on a marketer’s mind.
While C4ISR Marketing may sound scary when portrayed by the privacy advocates, it is a tool that can be used for the good of both the Marketer and the Customer. Ultimately, the Internet and net-centric world empowers customers too, and as far as I know, in the future there will be still be plenty of pizza joints to choose from….
To underscore his point, he asks you this – would you buy from Pizza Palace after being treated that way?
Il Sottovoce – The Whisper – I
March 3, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Chi pecora si fa, il lupo se la mangia.
Those who make themselves sheep will be eaten by the wolf.
The Store’s Covered – Is the Parking Lot?
March 3, 2008 By Leave a Comment
We’ve all seen signs like this. Companies with inventory and other assets to protect invest heavily to protect them. But given that marketers are integrating analytics with digital video, (please see yesterday’s Blog) this is a sign we’d like to see:
After all, we already have face recognition applications in use for security in public places; but before a customer steps foot in a retail building, why not know more about them as they’re driving into the parking lot? Using similar technology, look at the illustration below to think this out, starting at lower left, going clockwise.
Digital video technology could scan vehicles coming into a parking lot and (1) identify the type of vehicle (compact, luxury, SUV, etc.) based on a geometric profile library (in this case an SUV); (2) identify color of the vehicle utilizing spectrophotometers (Victory Red); (3) identify make and model based on a branding/logo recognition library (Chevy Silverado) ; and (4) origin of the vehicle and even some affiliation based on the existence and recognition of a “vanity” tag (West Virginia, NASCAR fan – specifically, Dale Earnhardt).
It shouldn’t be considered an intrusive method of data gathering; each of those data points are quite public statements of who the owner or driver of the vehicle is. Given hundreds of vehicles coming to “big box” stores such as a Home Depot or Best Buy or Wal-Mart over time, without knowing who the owner or driver is, a retailer can still gather peripheral data and eventually act upon it.
In the long run, there are some assumptions that can be made and conclusions that can be drawn about the owner or driver of the vehicle that can be substantiated or discovered by the datamining and business intelligence capabilities of a platform like those provided by Microstrategy or Business Objects, especially when cross-referenced with other store data such as sales, nearby branch sales, and perhaps secondary research concerning demographics and psychographics.
The arrival of a particular vehicle with the characteristics illustrated above could eventually trigger well-placed outdoor digital signage (such as from Reflect Systems) featuring sales information of products most likely to interest someone who owns or drives that type of vehicle. Other things could be possible but I’ll stop here. This complex a system won’t happen tomorrow. But…
Is this really feasible? Yes. Expensive to build? Yes. Problematic? Absolutely. Inevitable? Maybe.
Want to comment?
Holy Guacamole!
March 2, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Way back in the sweltering days of summer 2007 in “Every Point-of-Purchase is a Window of Opportunity,” The Marketing Consigliere blogged about how the point-of-purchase marketing faction was slowly but surely embracing the net-centric marketing concept. Six months later, one of those companies, VideoMining of State College, Pennsylvania, has made another interesting announcement regarding the launch of a new program called “C-Store Shopper Insights (CSI-1)” in cooperation with several national convenience store chains such as 7-Eleven.
The program’s objective is to better understand the in-store dynamics of key convenience store target demographics. By employing VideoMining’s platform, manufacturers and retailers will be able to gather precision metrics on consumer behavior and therefore be able to optimize their marketing and merchandising practices to boost sales.
Another potentially smart move for VideoMining is a partnership they forged this past autumn with Reflect Systems, Inc. of Dallas, Texas. As part of Reflect Systems’ “Digital Signage Consulting Toolkit,” VideoMining’s platform will allow businesses to have a real-time window into shoppers’ reactions to alterations in store layout and signage placement, which will then allow those business to optimize configuration and messaging of signage.
Envysion of Louisville, Colorado is the answer to a question that was asked in another blog (“The Fog of Piracy War“) from last summer: “How far are we off from permanently installing night-vision enhanced cameras in theaters, and networking them, and actually keeping digital video recordings?” According to their website, Envysion looks “at video from a network perspective and we use the network capabilities of the Internet to make video from lots of locations easily accessible to lots of authorized users.” Yikes… here come the night-vision cameras in the movie theaters…
The Marketing Consigliere has stated before that he especially likes to blog about C4ISR Marketing companies based in the region where he lives and works, so he enthusiastically welcomes another player into this small cadre of vendors: Avocado Security of Fairfax, Virginia is rolling a SaaS offering that feeds digital video from existing surveillance cameras and translates the data into actionable business information in a dashboard format. They have targeted retailers, restaurants, entertainment venues, malls, and other organizations that want to monitor and analyze customer behavior.
A great graphic on their website illustrates how they can take the traditional security monitoring interface and transform it into a dashboard with potentially more valuable, cross disciplined information.
Whether this is just marketing “sizzle” or real “steak” has yet to be seen, but of this he is quite certain – Mike and Kevin Shahbazi, who successfully started TrustDigital and exited, could be onto something and have the wherewithal to make it happen. One of the keys to their success will be their ability to deliver relevant, timely and decisive information to marketers through this application – it’s not a security platform; it’s a network centric marketing catalyst.
