We attended the Branding and Ad event at the Vancity Theatre yesterday. It was a good learning experience to know about the world view of advertisers. We spoke to several executives from advertising firms to know their perspectives on the potential for advertising within a retail navigation service.
Number of contacts interviewed: 12
Our takeaway from the event:
1. Focus more on the interactive aspect of advertising than on the ad delivery platform. The focus appears to be in engaging the consumer of advertising content through social media, for example.
ZipThru could offer a different type of customer engagement where the user needs as well as position at a point of time can be used to deliver interactive and contextual ads. A marketing strategy that highlights the interactive and contextual aspects of ZipThru ads would be useful.
2. Voice activated search
A CFO we met said that he would use a retail store navigation service if it supported voice commands. It would be inconvenient to type on a touchscreen phone while holding a shopping basket.
3. It might be useful to learn more about how slotting fees are determined. Slotting fee is the fee that a product vendor pays the retailer to shelve a particular product at a location. A similar model could be used for determining the ads that are to be displayed in the store shelf-view of ZipThru.