The Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of Marketing Beacons — B2B R
Beware in dark theaters! No really, this week there were several announcements that beacons are being installed in places that usually ask you to turn off your smartphones!
The Setting
Beacons are on Broadway. Gimbal is providing their location platform to Broadway Voice and Urban Airship, who are providing the mobile engagement platform. The new program, Playbill Passport, is available in all Broadway theaters serviced by Playbill. This will enable theaters to deliver content personalized to the theatergoer’s interests and the show they are seeing. In addition, they can scan their Playbill cover to access premium show content.
And for all you moviegoers, Mobiquity Networks and Screenvision are installing iBeacons throughout 300 multiplexes in the US, to create the largest movie theater-based mobile ad network. As with all beacons, these are supported via a smartphone app, but in this case, the app doesn’t need to be open in order to receive, and show, push notifications.
The Dr. Is In
This stuff is pretty cool. Everyone connected will be getting more information about the entertainment they’ve chosen to see! And the theaters are going to benefit as well. The amount of information they will collect about the audiences that pass through their doors will be valuable in endless ways.
The theaters better understand who’s in those seats, and can develop strategies around catering to them. How? Here’s some ideas:
- Theaters could select the most appropriate marketing and/or advertising messages before the movie begins to the demographic in the audience at the time.
- Broadway shows could also change their marketing to connect with specific demographics on their favored weekdays and show times.
- Both venues could offer discounts at the snack bar for items most popular with the demographic currently in the building (which they would learn from the beacons).
- Broadway could learn the price point for specific age groups and create more attractive marketing campaigns to get them to the theater.
- Depending on the functionality of the app (does it see other installed apps, does it offer any interactivity such as a survey) the theaters’ online marketing and advertising could become much more cost effective.
All of this is beneficial to both the theaters and the audiences as it helps develop more personal relationships and deliver more meaningful marketing messages. If audiences must deal with advertising (and we don’t see a way around that) then it would be great if they were from brands that interested everyone, or at least the majority of the audience.
Marketing beacons could make the overall experience better, possibly increase the audience, and better match the advertisers to the audience. Sounds like a win, win, win.
Enter Mr. Hyde, Stage Left
Do we really want to be tracked and targeted everywhere we go? Isn’t the whole concept of going to the theater, either live or film, to escape from our own lives for a while?
Yes, smartphones have been a problem in theaters for a long time. Those people who use them as lights in the middle of a dark scene, or “forget” to switch them to airplane mode of vibrate, and inevitably it rings, or worse…they answer it! However, those people choose to interact with their phone in the inappropriate moments. So far we can’t do much about stupidity.
But for those of us who want to leave the world behind, happily silencing our phone, we will potentially be bombarded with messages that add to our battery drain! Of course this is only if the required app is downloaded and installed, and it will be. The theaters will make it so enticing that even for the strong amongst us, we’ll eventually cave for one of the possible offers mentioned above. “Just for this showing,” we’ll tell ourselves, and then totally forget to uninstall.
Finale
Obviously, we see both sides of this coin, and are undecided.
On one hand, beacons are a terrific marketing technology for location-based businesses and allow them to better understand who they’re doing business with!
On the other hand, theaters, especially the historic ones on Broadway, are a bit sacred. In many cases live theater is as far away from technology as you can get! Audiences are immersed in experiences outside of their daily lives, and it is a much needed escape.
The lights go off for a reason, so everyone can focus on the stage or the screen…you know, the really big one in the front of the room, not the one in your hand!
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Originally published at www.b2brandd.com on February 3, 2016.