Having recently joined the club of iphone addicts, I rarely venture for more than five minutes without looking at screens. My addiction shifts from my MacBook to my iPhone (and may one day include the iPad in between). Only when I walk into a retail store do the real life items of clothing on the hangers, groceries on the shelves, etc. grab my attention away from my virtual world. With the move towards interactive displays in retail stores, however, ad agencies are finding ways to use screens to further engage customers in the retail shopping experience. Interactive displays allow advertisers to incorporate the customer’s real and virtual worlds.
The question becomes: are all of these screens really adding to the sales bottom line? Are retail stores increasing their sales or marketing by incorporating digital interactive displays? Yesterday, PSFK’s blog featured an interesting post, “Future of Retail: Does the Mobile Phone Make the Interactive Display Unnecessary?”
The post argues that the mobile phone trumps the medium of interactive displays because the phone is personal, social, touchable, consumer-powerful, and sensitive (to technology like RFID tags). Also, the post argues that just because retail stores can use interactive displays doesn’t mean that they have to. (How refreshing to hear – maybe blasting ads in from of consumers everywhere they go isn’t always the most effective advertising method!) Of course, the post also mentions the flip side of the argument – interactive displays may be useful for quick fun, or in cases where you want to access the online version of a store (which is especially useful for customers without smartphones).
Yet, critics of Target’s move to mobile coupons highlighted that despite the tremendous growth in the number of smartphones users, a nice proportion of the population still lacks access to a web browser on their cell phone. The argument that the shift to mobile marketing divides the smartphone users from the non-smartphone users, actually powers the concept of what I would call mobile marketing via cloud telephony. By setting up a targeted advertising campaign that increases the interactivity of consumers all through a simple telephone, any telephone, all by voice, ad agencies can increase their variety of mediums of reaching customers. Instead of adding more and more screens for already inundated consumers to watch, marketing agencies can try implementing a voice based marketing campaign. Many of PSFK’s arguments still hold – but advertising via cloud telephony can also reach a wider, and perhaps less technological audience.
Are you a cloud telephony provider with ideas on how marketing and ad agencies can use telephones to increase the interactivity of campaigns? Contact us and we’ll feature your ideas on Phone Marketing Insider.
Related posts:
- Convergys Launches Interactive Voice Portal
- McDonald’s Interactive Billboard
- Marketing and Ad Agencies use PMI to Transition to Cloud Telephony
- Business VoIP Systems- How Should You Choose?
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