Working with CLM BBDO, French fashion brand La Redoute fitted a number of its screen billboards in Paris with temperature and rain sensors allowing the brand to adapt the items it displayed on the billboards to on the weather conditions in the area.
Art Series Hotels and Naked Communications Melbourne put a theory to the test to see how guests would react to not having to check out until their room was actually needed. No more having to pack up and be gone by 11am if the next guest doesn’t arrive until 6pm. Guests could even stay an extra night if their room was not needed at all.
The results? 1,550 extra rooms were sold over a 4 week period with an additional $37,214 spent by guests on room service, not to mention generating an estimated $1.5 million worth of global media coverage.
There’s nothing more annoying on your smartphone then going onto a website and having to pinch your way around, zooming in and out, tapping tiny links trying to find what you’re looking for. That’s why it’s such a breath of fresh air when you come across such a perfect mobile-specific site like the one from the Irish Film Institute.
If you’re accessing the IFI site on a mobile, you are most likely out and about, looking for cinema times and that’s exactly what you get on the mobile version of their site, with a very mobile friendly booking process.
So it looks like it’s time for a shake up in the world of daily deal sites like Groupon and Living Social and the countless other smaller local rip-offs around the world. It seems as though being required to offer massive discounts and then giving a huge cut of the sales to these deal sites is not something that merchants are willing to continue to do on a regular basis.
Retailers are apparently seeing little benefit from using these sites which is unsurprising as the notion of creating loyal customers for your business by offering discounts of up to 70% has always seemed a bit far-fetched to me anyway. These customers are clearly only there for one reason: a massive deal and it’s unsustainable for retailers to offer such large discounts on a regular basis when they are seeing little repeat business from customers who are just there to pick up a bargain.
Groupon invested heavily in sales teams to market to small businesses and in the end, this has proven to be an unsustainable way of scaling up. But at the end of the day, it comes down to whether the customers (i.e. merchants) found any long-term value in this method of promotion and it looks as though they are voting with their feet and not continuing to use this platform.
I’m a Digital Strategist passionate about the intersection between technology and creative marketing. Last year I moved to London after 11 years living in Dubai.
