The message learned by lunar astronauts and others was in my head when I called in on the LBMA chapter in Singapore… and heard all about Australia.
The lively local location-based marketing group brings together an enthusiastic collection of like minds and last week’s gathering – which I visited on my way home from Digital Media Asia – was a sell-out.
Alex Burke, Asia Pacific chief executive of Sydney-based Tigerspike – who has been in the island state for two-and-a-half years – told of the transition to digital while he was at The Economist, and work with Australian traffic data and on Woolworths’ bold price check scheme there. From challenging shoppers to find a better price, the supermarket chain has progressed to an app which recognises which store you’re visiting and sorts your list into aisle order.
Hot now is Bluetooth 4, which enables very small beacons which can be used to lead shoppers around a store, pushing offers and extra information via their mobile phones.
“They can be in sequential order, time-triggered and – if you know the identity of the shopper – related to rewards programmes,” he says.
Burke says that while the future will include better applications of wearable technology – for people who will not wear Google Glass – and connected home devices within ‘the internet of things’, it is becoming business critical that security issues are properly addressed.
Ewa Szymanska, a behavioural data scientist in Singtel’s living analytics R&D lab, told of an experiment in Australia which tracked – with their consent – the movements of 500 Optus mobile phone users in Sydney using GPS data.
“We wanted to see if we could identify their lifestyle, and predict what their movements would be,” she says.
The outcome, was mapping of work and leisure travel which showed everything from Thursday shopping trips to visits to entertainment venues and casinos; which petrol brands they bought and where they took a break. Progressively, it was possible to group participants and pitch specific offers to them.
Given the data, would they be more likely to respond? “”It turns out they were three times as likely to do so,” Szymanska says.
Susanna Hasenoehrl, regional head of NTS Retail, moderated a panel discussion with Lennon Teng, cofounder of Locus Labs; Hoong An Wong, sales director of HungryGoWhere (now part of Singtel); Australian Claire Mula, managing director of Sprooki; and James Tan, Google head of performance products.
They covered a range of topics: Connected shoppers would respond differently to offers depending on how far they were away, for example. Claire Mula suggested that while it might take a 70 per cent discount to get someone to come in to a store in Jurong from Changi, 15 per cent could be enough if they were nearby. James Tan suggests “anyone within a kilometre of a store” can be urged in with the right offer.
The pitch would also be tailored to what was on offer: “Hundreds of dollars” to get a consumer to sign for health insurance perhaps, while a restaurant meal might only be worth cents or low dollars, Tan says.
One thing that is certain is that despite the costs of location-based marketing – “the more you target, the more it costs,” says Mula – an increasingly targetted, data-driven pitch is in the not-very-distant future.
Peter Coleman
Pictured (from left): panel participants Lennon Teng, Hoong An Wong, Claire Mula, and James Tan with Susanna Hasenoehrl