You’re walking through a vast big-box store, using your phone like a dowsing rod to find the best deal.
Or a sale on something that’s been on your Amazon wish list. Or the Amazon wish list of your wife/husband/kids. The phone, with GPS enabled, near-field sensor technology and a compass, leads you through the maze of merchandise like Daedalus after the Minotaur, and as you pass the garden hoses and stacks of denim onesies with the “Anarchy” symbol on them (evil designers: 2-year-olds are inherently like Sid Vicious, why reinforce this?), your phone buzzes in your hand and a big arrow appears, guiding your around the corner, and face-to-face with…
Man, you can just see the iPhone/Verizon/T-mobile commercials coming, can’t you? If there’s one thing that will tantalize our modern society of shopaholics, it’s the thought that somehow we’re going to be privy to inside information that’ll give us a special deal that nobody else will get. Because we’re faster, we’re there first, and our technology is superior! Fear our shopping powers, we shall chortle as we push the wobbly carts through the parking lots. We are clearly the evolutionarily superior hunter-gatherer, and our mewling offspring shall gorge themselves on the 2-for-1 bounty of Baconnaise that we have procured through our use of space-age technology…
Greg Grunberg of Yowza!! on Dowsing for Deals from Artesian Media on Vimeo.
Greg Grunberg, co-founder of Yowza!! mobile coupons, talks about how retailers want to build Minority Report-like capabilities in their stores, to track where you are and deliver personalized come-ons designed to get you to buy more stuff. Will we come to accept this, as we are accepting the gradual erosion of any semblance of privacy on Facebook? What happens when we link Facebook with mobile with our shopping habits through coupon services?
There are obviously some big issues lurking here beneath the surface, and it’s likely that we’ll never really have a society-wide debate about them. So you might as well just enjoy the spectacle of a famous guy getting all excited over being able to tell you that you can save 8 cents on the can of tuna fish, next aisle over…
Actually, what Grunberg said at the OMMA Mobile conference was:
“You’re walking through a store and you get an alert on your phone, based on your buying habits. We’ve been approached by huge retailers that have said, ‘We’d love to set up that system in our stores.’
“I said, I’d love to, too. We have no idea how to do it.’ But it’s the future. To geo-locate in the store itself, that’s exciting. That’s you walking around, just fishing for the best deal on something that interests you based on your shopping habits.
“The information we’re gathering, again we’ve only been in existence for four months [but to track] if a person has looked at a coupon and then driven five miles to actually use that coupon – that’s powerful.”
This starts getting into “Minority Report” territory, of course, that being the tried-and-true paradigm for explaining how behavioral targeting (BT) and location-aware ad delivery will combine to send you stuff that is absolutely tailored to dovetail with your history, habits, interests and credit limit.
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As we are all discussing Greg Grunberg of Yowza!! on Location-based Mobile Coupons | The Mobile Web Design Blog, Use coupons when available. Take the time and have the patience to clip and organize coupons. When added together, savings from using all coupons in one trip can be huge.