After presenting the FOREVER 21 interactive OOH promotion in Times Square where a real model interacted with the passer bys via a giant video wall and also VISA creating its social media space RIGHTCLIQ where members gather , discuss and decide about their shopping, here comes MasterCard with its MARKETPLACE launched in the streets. Digital screens are placed in the streets, out of home media, nearby shopping areas and with detectors and RSS feed mechanisms , they show images to purchase at real bargains targetting thus the walking pedestrians :)
the full article is featured in AdWeek as follow:
MasterCard Takes E-Commerce to the Streets
Retail displays consist of motion sensor-activated screens on which items like purses, laptops and sneakers appear. MasterCard has launched an out-of-home campaign to promote its MarketPlace e-commerce site. The goal? To get consumers' attention both online and offline. The credit card brand has put up storefront ads featuring black-and-white vinyl panels and taglines like "A smarter way to shop online" and "Where bargains find you." The effort, which includes ads in New York, Chicago, Miami and Philadelphia, wraps up this month. The displays, set up in busy retail locations, consist of motion sensor-activated screens on which items like purses, laptops and sneakers pop up when someone walks by. There is also a mobile component: Pedestrians can view the latest offers via MasterCard MarketPlace's RSS feed and e-mail deals to themselves. MasterCard hopes "to capitalize on consumers' dual online-offline shopping behavior by directly placing the MasterCard MarketPlace 'shop smarter' message within the physical, brick-and-mortar shopping experience," said Cheryl Guerin, the company's svp of digital marketing. Storefronts were a "natural channel extension," she said. In addition to the OOH campaign, MasterCard is running TV, print and online ads to promote its MarketPlace business. Digital efforts include tweeting "overwhelming offers," which are "time-sensitive" deals offered daily on the site, Guerin said. The company did not disclose the campaign's cost. It is, however, the first time MasterCard has launched an interactive outdoor initiative to support a larger marketing push. GSD&M Idea City, digital agency R/GA and Inwindow Outdoor worked on the campaign.
MasterCard spent $164 million on advertising in 2009 and $31 million through the first five months of this year, excluding online, per Nielsen.
- Elaine Wong, Brandweek
Fun and happiness, partly because of their scarcity, are hot topics. Today life is hard, in new ways. In addition to the economic downturn, people experience life as TOO fast, TOO complex and TOO competitive. Everyone is rushed. Everyone is pulled in many directions.
This hardness of life can all too often push away the experience of fun and happiness. But people want some fun in their lives. And, of course, Americans are always in pursuit of happiness.
When folks are having fun they feel they can let their hair down and put aside their inhibitions. Marketers rarely talk about fun directly, but in designing digital offerings that promise an "experience," or when focused on building customer relationships, the covert subtext of most advertising should be aimed at creating the feeling of fun.
As a cognitive anthropologist working in marketing and consumer decision making, I recently completed three projects -- for a cruise line, a sporting goods line and a refreshment beverage -- that uncovered some key aspects about peoples' experience of fun.
FIVE FACETS OF FUN
1. New. A key word in the experience of fun is "new." People often have fun when having new experiences, learning new things, meeting new people.
2. Going beyond expectation. To have fun requires going beyond the routine or familiar, to meet what people call "something extra." Surprise (something new) and the unexpected (something not habitual) contribute to a feeling of the non-ordinary.
3. Feeling open. To have fun people need a sense of "becoming," wherein nothing is pre-scripted and the end is unknown at the beginning; here there is an unfolding and an exploration.
4. No. Fun often requires the absence of things. In this case, no analyzing, doubting, pressure to conform, pretense, restrictions, judgment.
5. Freedom. Choice and independence are undercurrents of fun. People interpret this as doing what one wants, when one wants, and doing it at one's own pace ("finding your own rhythm"), without any external demands. This is often called "me time," which people now deem a luxury.
The surprising primary constituent of fun is feeling understood.
Relief (minimizing loss) and satisfaction (maximizing gain) are experienced differently and are, in fact, represented by different neurological activity patterns.
If I like a product or an activity and buy (or pursue) it because its attributes meet my interests, I can be relieved to have it. However, if I feel that having a product or engaging in an activity reflects my identity and expands my latent expressions of self, a certain relationship develops with that product, brand or activity. It is that relationship that makes me happy and that I experience as fun.
People feel happy not when a product or a store demonstrates an understanding of the consumer as a purchasing process, but when the marketer authentically displays an understanding of who the consumer is as a person.
Understanding a person as an identity is different than explaining him or her as a consumer, as a demographic unit. At best the former generates "liking" while the latter establishes "attachment." While I can like a transaction, I am happiest in a relationship when having fun.
In a relationship, people talk about feeling "truly alive," of "turning on a different brain." This can only occur when marketers seek not only to make magic, but to make magic fun.
Fun is a magical thing. You can find the "YOU" in fun. People are intrinsically drawn to such an experience.
So come on marketers, think "fun" and people will follow your brand more often.
Bob Deutsch is a cognitive anthropologist and founder of the consulting firm Brain Sells. He can be reached at dr.bob@brain-sells.com.
