The world is getting more crowded by the minute. And while some facets of life seem to be more distant and disconnected than decades ago, there's a growing field of technologies and new human user interfaces that is bringing commerce and people together like never before.
Although the end business goal might be to sell, sell, sell, digital in-store marketing tools have adapted to the demands of a more educated, research-minded, and networked population. Simple messages don't always deliver on the goals of marketers, particularly when the target audience wants to be enriched in the subject matter.
Enter the era of digital in-store marketing.
Adam Broitman, director of strategy and ringleader at Crayon, has been researching this burgeoning marketing channel alongside iMedia and has developed his own research and some interesting observations.
"Digital in-store presents a curious but very compelling circular movement from where we were at the onset of ecommerce," Broitman says. "When ecommerce became a formal discipline, one of the core objectives was to emulate the type of experience that one might have in a physical retail store. Of course, the human user interface had to be adapted to create a metaphor for real-world shopping, but the end state consisted of logic that was synonymous with what you might find at a traditional retail outlet (shelves, register, customer service etc.)."
According to Broitman, with the rise of digital in-store, we once again find ourselves trying to parallel one experience with another. Many of us have become so accustomed to shopping online that for any digital interface to truly engage us, and effect our purchase decisions, it must be on par with the best online ecommerce solutions.
"Digital interfaces in stores must be familiar to consumers in order for them to be effective, and in order to make these interfaces familiar, they must emulate some of the logic that we find online," Broitman says.
In the world of digital in-store, or out-of-home, there are numerous companies making waves (and money). iMedia spoke at length with Intava, Ecast, and Adcentricity to capture a sense of where things are headed from all sides -- for a company that builds dynamic touchscreens, one that manages a nationwide network of stations in the hospitality industry, and one that sells digital ad space across North America spanning 140,000 screens.
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