Interactive advertising could boost the telesperience, but there are pitfalls
In telecoms we know what it’s like to get carried away with the romance of a new service, without having figured out all the wrinkles – like how to bill for a service or maximise revenues from it. There are some hard-won lessons out there that the interactive advertising market really needs to learn from.
By Darran Clements
At the end of January, The Times published an interesting article by
Ahmed reports on new technology that will allow us to buy items we see on our TV by clicking on bubbles that appear onscreen beside products. This “hotspot” technology – fanfare introduction for another confusing duplication of technology terminology – is being used in a new online Nike advert featuring Ronaldo and allows us to buy his shirt and underpants. (!)
Ahmed quotes a number of advertising industry players who are understandably excited about the possibility of this technology, although it should be noted that it is still not quite here – and won’t be in the UK until after the digital switchover in 2012 is complete.
Okay so the way it’s presented suggests that we will be able to click through and actually buy a product from our telly. I won’t be holding my breath for this, however. As far as I can tell what they’re actually offering initially is purely an advert providing further information about the product you’re interested in. Neat, but not as neat as being able to order a take-away delivered to your door half an hour after the advert played. Or ordering the featured book, film or game from Amazon or WHSmith.
While serving up further information is relatively straightforward, selling a product from an advert can be horribly more complex. The single biggest problems are going to be to do with repudiation, authorisation, payment, security and customer service. Imagine if my 11 year old gets hold of the remote and starts ordering up a load of Wii games he fancies unbeknownst to me! Or the 5 year old orders those tempting looking sweets for home delivery plus a fancy party dress and some special order Polly Pockets!
When you boil it down to the nitty gritty, there is a whole negative telesperience out there waiting for consumers (aka parents). It doesn’t look quite so bright an idea if your repudiation levels are high and customers are ringing the phone off the hook complaining.
Some companies are closer to being able to implement on this vision than others. Amazon, for example, has much of the infrastructure already to sell goods online and deliver them, as well as ensuring non-repudiation, proper authorisation of transctions, ease of payment and security. But many retailers have nothing like the type of infrastructure needed. And while 2 days to get a book may seem reasonable, what about when you want to order the pizza featured from Pizza-For-Me and it takes 2 days to arrive? Of course all the Pizza firm needs is to ensure the order is real because it already has a mechanism for delivering pizzas and collecting the money. But it risks either being overwhelmed by orders – there is no volume control! – or by not getting them promptly (which means complaints, unhappy customers and repudiation), or by them being ordered by customers outside the delivery zone.
It’s an interesting proposition, but one which raises a whole raft of issues to do with technology and process that need to be worked through. It also potentially cuts smaller firms out of the market unless they can connect to a technology platform easily and cheapily. I would expect this technology being used for digital goods first, followed by non-perishable/non-realtime goods such as Ronaldo’s shirt. For now it looks like if we want the featured pizza offer we’re going to have to phone rather than click. But you can see that players like Amazon are extremely well placed for exploiting this market – both themselves and by using their IT platform to enable others to transact as well.
