(internetretailer.com)
The smartphone is the best option for consumers wanting to buy what they’re watching on TV, says Overstock’s marketing chief.
Overstock.com Inc. is testing a combination of TV commerce and mobile commerce to get couch potatoes with smart TVs and armed with mobile devices, or just the TVs, to buy what they see on Overstock.com’s latest TV ad campaign, dubbed “Overstocktober.”
Overstock.com, No. 30 in the recently published 2015 Internet Retailer Mobile 500, is using TV commerce technology and services provider Delivery Agent Inc. for the campaign. Delivery Agent first added Overstock.com to Delivery Agent’s ShopTV smart TV app, which features a variety of retailers and brands including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Fanatics Inc., Wayfair.com, Ticketmaster, Pepsi, Cuisinart and Schwinn. ShopTV appears on close to 20 million smart TVs and related devices, and expects that number to double next year. So any consumer with a smart TV with the ShopTV app now can shop Overstock.com through the app.
But buying via the TV commercial requires a technology that Delivery Agent says is critical to the future of TV commerce: ACR, or automatic content recognition. Television networks, content producers and advertisers embed their programs and commercials with what amounts to an electronic fingerprint. Delivery Agent uses what it calls a proprietary data engine to identify these fingerprints that tell the smart TV what is being displayed, like an Overstock.com commercial. Automatic content recognition technology also can be used to enable a “handshake” that links a smart TV and a mobile device.
When the Overstocktober commercials appear on a smart TV with ACR technology (about 50% of all smart TVs today, Delivery Agent says), an overlay appears, showing a special offer on a bed with three choices: Shop Collection, Exclusive Offer for Mobile and Exit.
A consumer can use her remote control to click on Shop Collection and be taken to the ShopTV app to shop the advertised products, click on Exclusive Offer for Mobile to be texted a hyperlink to the special pages on the Overstock.com mobile commerce site or app, or click on Exit to dismiss the overlay. Consumers with existing ShopTV accounts will not have to enter their phone numbers to receive the text; other consumers can use their remotes to enter their mobile numbers. Also, the text links are deep links, meaning they can sense if a smartphone user has the Overstock.com mobile app on their device and instead of opening a mobile web page send that user to the page in the mobile app.
The smartphone is the best option for shopping for a TV viewer: She already is familiar with how to shop on a smartphone and she doesn’t have to interrupt what she is watching, Saum Noursalehi, senior vice president of marketing at Overstock.com, tells Internet Retailer.
23% of U.S. Internet users browse the web or apps on their smartphones while watching TV and 19% do the same with their tablets, according to a June 2014 Harris Interactive poll. 26% shop online (via PC or mobile) while watching TV, the poll says.
“The smartphone likely will be the preferred method for shopping,” Noursalehi says. “But we will be experimenting with various options with Delivery Agent, including opening a web browser on the TV screen and shopping there. But I think the phone is the best. It does not interfere with the TV experience, and so many people have become accustomed to using their mobile devices while watching television.”
Noursalehi adds that the big benefit of TV commerce may not be the commerce itself but the engagement and transactional data retailers glean from TV shopping activity. TV advertising has always been a “black box” to marketers—difficult to target, measure and quantify, he says.
“But with all the data generated by the smart TV and smartphone interactions, we will be able to much more intelligently know which channels, times of day and so forth perform best,” he says. “Being able to measure the click-through rates and transactions a TV campaign generates will enable us to turn around and be smarter about our ad purchase decisions. On the surface, TV commerce seems like another selling channel, but the bigger value is in the data we will get out of it.”
For this test, Overstock.com is paying Delivery Agent a fee for each thousand impressions, the CPM model standard in online advertising, but the retailer may turn to an affiliate relationship in the future. The two companies will be testing different language on the TV overlay and can make changes to the campaign as it runs.
Delivery Agent says it is finishing a study with Nielsen that shows consumer engagement levels with TV commerce to be very high.
“We need to make it easy for users, and that means a multi-device experience: a smartphone, a tablet and a remote control,” says Delivery Agent chairman and CEO Mike Fitzsimmons. “Shopping is a form of entertainment, and when done correctly, bringing the two together can be a powerful thing.”
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