Curiouser and curiouser.
A bevy of articles written by a variety of folks in the last 60 days point out the pickle in which advertisers find themselves.
The subjects range from the claim that the future of advertising is in Print, TV and perhaps online (Advertising Age) to a BrandWeek piece talking about the superiority of in-store signage and displays to the article on How Mobile Makes Bricks-and-Mortar Retail Accountable for advertising and for operations.
The article from Ad Age cites the ARF and a Wharton School study findings about how traditional media drives word of mouth advertising and there has been “no erosion of TV advertising sales impact over the years.” Similar comments are made about other traditional media including print. Much of the research backing this up however is from the 1990’s which gives one some pause. (more…)
Not just any word though.
We have had discussions with a variety of manufacturers, retailers, brokers and others who work day in and day out to carry out the four major in-store efforts in order to build sales. A surprising number take pictures of their efforts. Not so surprising was finding that most of those pictures are quickly forgotten after they were captured. While there is certainly the “ooohh and ahhh factor” in having pictures of real in-store conditions the systematic analysis for action process of those pictures is nowhere to be found.
Why is that? Well pictures contain an incredible amount of information: presence, facings, assortment, holes, out of stocks, shelf location, proximity, signage and shopability. Information that you cannot discern from hand-held scanned data. What is more information derived from these pictures is accurate and generally undistorted. And when pictures are taken in lieu of HH-scanned information, data collection times are dramatically reduced. However, without a process to pull that data out of the picture, organize it, roll it up with all the other pictures of the same event and then generate the exceptions to the planned execution those pictures are worthless. They are akin to those boxes and or jump drives of family photos. While each image is precious, together they are overwhelming, unmanageable, frustrating, under-informing and ….well you get the picture. This is one of the reasons that ShelfSnap is meeting with such an enthusiastic reception from manufacturers, retailers, brokers and others. We recognize that the picture has three roles in the process:1. A very efficient data collection device, that cannot distort the truth.2. Raw material for the ShelfSnap Image Recognition system which identifies products in the picture, and the SS Spatial Analytics Churn Engine which counts the facings, identifies the shelf on which the product resides, understands the out-of-stocks and the like.3. The picture also validates the interesting status miscues (or successes) or the exceptions to the plan that ShelfSnap identifies. The value that the unique ShelfSnap service brings is the ability to understand what is in the pictures, and then the ability to inform you of the important news in and across pictures. The WORD that is worth a thousand pictures is exception! The ShelfSnap process reports the exceptions and therefore the yields ability to direct action to the stores where conditions warrant.
