Another Super Bowl Ad Fest, This Time on the Cellphone
By NICK WINGFIELD
Want to see the Vince Lombardi Trophy that goes to the
Super Bowl
winner? Take a left in 15 feet. Looking to buy some
Super Bowl
merchandise? Try the fourth floor of Macy’s, straight
ahead.
The Super Bowl remains the biggest mass-market
advertising event
in the country. But this year, a new kind of
advertising — personalized
and based on physical location down to a matter of
feet — will greet
fans in Times Square and MetLife Stadium, where this
weekend’s
championship game will be played.
At both locations, the National Football League has
sprinkled tiny
wireless transmitters that can send finely tuned
messages to
smartphones. It is the boldest test yet for a
months-old technology that
could change how brands of all sorts market to their
customers.
For now, the alerts are mostly limited to practical
news (like the
nearest entry gate) or promoting in-store sales (say,
for your favorite
chocolate) in the first wave of establishments using it.
But already the
technology has privacy advocates and legal experts
brimming with
concern about the implications. Smartphone users could
potentially be
spammed with advertisements, they say, and a company
that collects
the data might be inclined to sell it.
“When it rolls out, you will see all this utility for
it,” said Ryan Calo,
an assistant professor of law at the University of
Washington in Seattle.
“And at some point the economic incentives will come
into play and it
won’t be pretty.”
The transmitters, often called beacons, will be in
several hundred
stores and public areas in the coming months,
including at two dozen
Major League Baseball stadiums and many Macy’s and
American Eagle
Outfitters stores. Apple already has the devices in
over 250 stores.
While location-based alerts and advertisements have
long been a
feature of smartphones, the new technology requires
less from users.
When Apple updated the software for iPhones several
months ago, the
company included a new feature, iBeacons, that
displays alerts even
when a user is not running an app.
That change has led to a surge in interest among
brands.
Technology executives say Apple is further along with
its version of the
technology, which is why most alerts of this kind are
now sent to iPhone
users. But smartphones running Google’s Android
operating system can
also be targeted.
Once users download a brand’s app and give permission
to receive
alerts, they can get messages whenever their phone
drifts within range
of one of these beacons. (Typically, users can stop
the tracking and the
alerts by changing the app’s settings.)
For brands like Major League Baseball, which had more
than 10
million users of its MLB.com At Bat app last year, the
potential for
outreach is enormous. Brick-and-mortar stores are
quickly warming to
the technology, too, thrilled by the prospect of being
able to fine-tune
marketing messages and gather more data about customer
behavior,
just as online competitors like Amazon have for years.
“The power of this is it really is able to connect the
real world, the
brick-and-mortar world, with the virtual world with a
level of
granularity that hasn’t existed before,” said Manish
Jha, the N.F.L.’s
general manager of mobile.
When shoppers walk through the door of one of 100
American
Eagle stores installing the technology, they will
receive a welcome message on their smartphones, notifications of discounts and
product
recommendations. The precision of the technology will
allow American
Eagle to show sale information for jeans only when a
customer is in the
jeans department.
“It gives the retailer a chance to have a one-to-one
dialogue directly
with the consumer,” said Alexis Rask, the chief
revenue officer of
Shopkick, a start-up in Silicon Valley working with
American Eagle and
other retailers like Macy’s to set up beacons in their
stores.
Major League Baseball will have beacons installed
throughout
Fenway Park in Boston, AT&T Park in San Francisco
and about 20 other
stadiums in time for opening day this year. People
with smartphones
and one of the two M.L.B. apps with beacon support
will get buzzed
with greetings when they pass through turnstiles,
messages about
nearby statues and other points of interest and
reminders about how
many loyalty points they have from past purchases at
the ballpark.
Robert Bowman, president and chief executive of MLB
Advanced
Media, the Internet arm of Major League Baseball, said
stadiums were
becoming “crucibles for technology.” But he said there
was a bold line
between gentle marketing pitches and obnoxious
upselling.
Where is that line?
“Welcome back, and last time you bought this jersey.
This week, do
you want to buy this jersey?” Mr. Bowman said,
composing an
unattractive smartphone advertisement on the fly. “To
me, that’s crass
commercialism.”
Other location-tracking technologies have helped
people orient
themselves on maps by using the satellite-based GPS
and Wi-Fi access
points. Those technologies, though, are not as precise
as beacons at
detecting a user’s location. GPS signals also do not
travel well indoors,
and beacons, many of which are battery-powered and use
a technology
called Bluetooth low energy, are cheaper and easier to
install than Wi-Fi
antennas. Qualcomm, for instance, makes beacons that
cost $10 each
with batteries that last up to three years.
Privacy advocates say they are concerned that the
proliferation of
beacons would add considerably to the vast amounts of
data marketers are already gathering about consumers. While apps often indicate
in
their terms of service how they use location data,
many people ignore
the fine print of those agreements.
Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the
Electronic Privacy
Information Center, a nonprofit research and advocacy
group, said
marketers could use the new location tracking tools in
unexpected ways,
like mapping relationships for people who happen to
visit the same
location repeatedly.
“Users will have no idea what information is collected
or how it will
be used,” he said.
The companies installing the beacons say they will
respect the
privacy of people who use the technology. Mr. Jha of
the N.F.L., for
instance, said the league was not connecting personal
and location data
with its Super Bowl experiment. Supporters say that
most people will
find the technology has benefits, like discounts and
helpful tips, worth
the trade-off of sharing data. In a test at a Miami
Dolphins game at Sun
Life Stadium in Florida last month, Qualcomm used the
technology to
alert fans about where to find the shortest concession
lines.
And the companies say they realize they need to avoid
sending
irrelevant or excessive alerts. Todd Dipaola, the
chief executive of
InMarket, a company that has begun testing beacons
inside grocery
stores in Cleveland, San Francisco and Seattle, said
that approach
would not last long.
“There’s one penalty for annoying your consumer —
that’s the death
penalty,” he said, and then described the process of
deleting an app.
“They hold down the
app, push the X and it’s gone.”
This is a repost of an article that appeared on the New York Times on January 30, 2014
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