Robocop and Augmented Reality

By Sion Jones

What do you think that big helmet is on Murphy’s head after he becomes Robocop? That’s Augmented Reality (AR) working at its best. The user, in this case a police officer, is being fed a stream of data and information to enhance their vision and understanding of what’s around them – i.e. knowing where the bad guys are.

Murphy uses his head-mounted display to see things like his mission objectives as well as pre-aim any number of targets before blasting them to smithereens with his over the shoulder trick shots.

If Robocop could do that back in 1987 what could he do in 2012 with all the new AR technology out there?

One such piece of technology is Aurasma - a new AR platform that weaves the physical and virtual worlds together for the first time. It’s designed for 3G and 4G mobile devices (iPhone’s, tablets, androids etc) and it uses the device’s video camera and a free App to work its magic.

Have a quick look at how it works:

It’s a simple concept of layering video onto real life images, but it’s a fantastic one too. It’s new, fun and it’s a cool way of finding information. I think Aurasma will contribute to the fundamental shift in the way we gather information from now on.

Take a food print ad for example; it’s very difficult to get the message across with print ads but by pointing at it with your smartphone you could click on it to do a number of different actions e.g. show the TV ad, show different recipe ideas for that product, purchase the product online etc

With Aurasma I suppose the opportunities are limitless(ish)… but just imagine what Robocop would have done with it…

By Ian Thomas

The growth in online shopping has raised a whole new set of issues related to waiting in for deliveries. Retailers have been aware of this issue for a while now, with more and more offering a “click and collect” service and online grocers compete as much on their delivery capabilities as they do on quality and value. In order to secure the much coveted Christmas Shop delivery slot in the days immediately before Christmas, you would have needed to have booked your slot with Ocado many weeks ago.

Alternatively you could book a house-sitter, paid to wait in for deliveries. According to BBC News 79% of the UK population has taken time off work to wait in for a delivery and new businesses are popping up offering this service. Not a problem that we have at Arc – Sarah Greenwood featured in this news piece is none other than our own Sarah Leccacorvi.

A lot of bottle

By Craig Addy

The term ‘the simpler the idea the better it works’ is a phrase that’s frequently bounced around our industry. The point being the cleanest and simplest thought tends to be the stronger ad. This clip has nothing really to do with advertising but is an example of a simple and effective idea not many can trump it. This one sells itself. Watch and be impressed at the simple ingenuity.

Festive or frugal

By Sarah Leccacorvi

As we steadily approach Christmas with a backdrop of falling sales and a crippling European economy, it will be interesting to see if our much adored season will be as festive as Santa’s grotto or a frugal as Christmas at Ebenezer Scrooge.

The impact of the economy has knocked consumers’ confidence and pushed them to be even more smart and savvy than ever before.  We’ve already seen the rise of the multi-store shop and with e-retail now firmly placed on the map, it’s harder for retailers to increase footfall and achieve shopper loyalty. Each year retailers approach Christmas with a twofold strategy. Firstly they launch their value strategy a couple of months prior, offering shoppers a great way to save at Christmas. Then they roll out their TV advertisement, promoting the culinary expertise of their Christmas range. It is a contradiction in terms really, however it is still Christmas and whilst shoppers will downtrade on some areas they will equally trade up on others. Mintel recently discovered that leisure is to be one of the hardest industries hit at Christmas whereas food and clothing are areas where shoppers are less inclined to cut back on. In-store, the POS reflects this twofold approach with both Christmas branding and pricing offers often competing for space.

Two great schemes launched this year to support the dwindling Christmas allowance include the Morrisons ‘Collector Card’ scheme. Here customers can receive £25 off their Christmas shop, as long as they spend over £40 in their previous six shops. And Tesco’s launched their Christmas Clubcard Exchange. This enables shoppers to exchange a £5 Clubcard Voucher for £10 worth of products ranging from clothing to champagne. It’s an intelligent way to get shoppers to spread their total shop across one retailer and hope they convert into loyal ones. A further scheme announced on the back of Sainsbury’s Price Matching was ASDA’s £5 Thank You voucher. It offers shoppers an ASDA voucher when they spend £40 in store. It is a strategy launched to retain their position as a key value retailer.

So where will the shoppers flock, to pick up their indulgent Christmas treats? Well if the responses to the TV advertisements are anything to go by, then apparently it is that value retailer ASDA! After seeing their advertisement that leverages LEITHS, a leading London cookery school to demonstrate the quality of their Christmas goods, 30% of shoppers would visit ASDA according to a new poll. Not far behind ASDA was Waitrose with 26% shoppers. With the combination of the authentic and classic Delia Smith and the creative and fascinating Heston Blumenthal, shoppers are already flocking in store to pick up Heston’s pine sugar mince pies and Delia’s Christmas Cake Kit, enabling even the novice baker to achieve their own Christmas creation. In fact, Heston’s Hidden Orange Christmas Pudding has been in such demand it is currently sold out in-store and is being sold for up to £150 on eBay!

Which retailer will enable shoppers to realise their Christmas dreams? The proof will be in the pudding…

Get on the floor

By Jacqui Gray

And no I don’t mean throwing some signature moves on the dance floor at the Christmas party, I mean the shop floor.  I’m talking specifically about getting out onto the floor of a grocery retailer, and as often as possible, as there really is no substitute for experiencing the shopping experience first-hand. 

So I am suggesting that put your shoppers hat on. I’m not talking about the one that allows you to go around the store on automatic pilot, I mean the one that makes you conscious of every facet of the experience, the one that gives you the green light to dawdle around the store and take it all in, from how the store is laid out, to any products that leap out of the shelf. You never know you might find it interesting.  

The things that I found interesting on a recent dawdling trip included the massive display units featured to promote the DVD release of one of the Pirates of the Caribbean films (not sure which, but they were impossible to ignore); the gorgeous Lindor chocolate truffles from Lindt that were being handed out (one per customer apparently); the new augmented reality stations showing clips of games and films (a great innovation, albeit no one was there to show customers how to use it); and then the opportunity to have my eyebrows re-shaped (I didn’t go for this, I find the Dolmio day monobrow works well for me).  

Have a look at the Tesco augmented reality trial:

All these mini experiences added up to a very different shopping trip and albeit grocery shopping is not exciting it was certainly less tedious than it used to be, so a big thanks to the retailers and brands that are really starting to understand and invest in the customers journey.

And when you’ve done being a shopper feel free to shake your limbs in an erratic manner to the latest tunes, be it Bublé or the genius that is Florence and the Machine.  Quick question are dance floors still illuminated, it’s been a while?

The beauty of understatement

By John Jessup

I have to admit to being attracted by certain signs. I am particularly partial to the ones with pictures of dogs and ducks, monarchs and such like. They welcome me to gentle imbibing, and mirth filled conversations. With these things in mind I found myself strolling down a soft white beach in Jamaica, with the warm Caribbean Sea playing around my feet (sorry got a bit carried away there). I passed several establishments, sporting signs emblazoned with pictures of West Indian beauties, or the local flora and fauna. Others had pictures of Pirates and names like ‘The Jolly Roger’ and ‘Captains Cabin’, but none of them attracted me in the same way as the one pictured above. This sign, with its simple typography and weather beaten look, promised so much more than its flashier counterparts. It felt genuine and unpretentious, it promised the real thing; Jamaica for Jamaicans. So I sat down with the locals and enjoyed my ice-cold Red Stripe and jerk chicken as hot and spicy as Usain Bolt’s jock strap after a 100-metre dash.

The next time we sit down to dream up our latest piece of communication, it’s worth remembering, you don’t have to shout the loudest to be heard above the rest.

Bye bye, Best Buy

by Alan Treadgold

The recent news that Best Buy is to close its UK superstores is hardly a surprise but certainly causes pause for thought.  As well as being very expensive to open in the first place, large superstores selling consumer electronics can lose a lot of money quickly and be horribly expensive to shut down.  Sadly, this has been Best Buy’s – very expensive – lesson.  Best Buy is a very capable retailer and its efforts to establish a superstore presence in the UK was a genuinely brave effort to bring something new and different to the UK retail scene and the UK shopper.  History will doubtless deride Best Buy’s move into the UK to have been brave to the point of reckless.  But this would be unfair.  Certainly, their timing in entering the UK was, in hindsight, about as bad as it could get: selling big ticket electronic products in the teeth of one of the deepest recessions we have ever seen is about as tough as it gets.  But Best Buy’s travails were more than bad timing or bad planning – depending on your point of view.  Rather, it encapsulates very vividly some of the new fundamental rules of retailing in the UK. 

As the old truism has it, the one thing better than learning from your mistakes is learning from other peoples.  And so here are some lessons to be learned from Best Buy – at rather less than the £100m+ that they cost Best Buy itself:

•  You can’t be quick when your business is superstore retailing.  They take a long, long time to build and a long time to get up to speed. What may have seemed like a very good idea at the planning stage might be a terrible idea by the time the doors open.  Whatever money you spend on scenario planning will look cheap compared to the cost of getting it wrong.
• Big box destination stores are very difficult and expensive to establish when the brand above the door and the product offer within it is largely unknown to your target shoppers.  Think carefully about whether what you’re bringing into a market is different enough and differentiated enough from that which is already there.
• Spreading your new stores thinly across the country rather than concentrating them in a single region makes the task of establishing your brand and your identity even more difficult and expensive. 
• Single format store-based retailing doesn’t work in the multi-channel worlds of connected shoppers.  Especially when they’re buying electricals.  A large number of conveniently located small stores acting as collection points and supporting a very strong web presence is the way to go to market in electricals retailing. 
• Large superstores are definitely not the present – let alone the future – for electricals retailing in the UK.

Cyber ATM

This is a pretty unusual idea. Russian bank Sberbank is in
the process of developing a cash machine that can tell
when you’re lying; it has the ability to ask you personal
questions, analyse your responses and your voice (presumably
making it really hard to get cash out when you’ve had a
few), as well as scanning your retinas and fingerprints. Why
so high-tech? So that it can process complicated requests
such as loan applications that would otherwise have to be
handled by a human.

I don’t know about you, but I’d be a bit nervous about getting
a personal loan from a robot in the street…

http://www.sbrf.ru/moscow/ru/ 

QR stamps

Croatia’s ‘2011 Postage Stamp Day’ marks the twentieth
anniversary of them, er, using stamps. The
Croatian postal service is celebrating with clever QR-coded stamps.
When you’ve sent a letter you can receive instant delivery confirmation,
as well as tracking all the places it’s passed through on a dedicated
mapping site. Making up for lost time in impressive style.

http://www.qrmarka.posta.hr/en/

After 24 years New Zealand did it….just!

By Caron Beith

After 45 days it’s all over. New Zealand are Rugby World Champions after 24 years in the waiting!  And well deserved. 

A gutsy, gritty finish to a fantastic Final. They have been the best team throughout the whole tournament. France though last Sunday were amazing and impressive. Rougerie, Trinh-Duc, Yachvili and the incredible Thierry Dusautoir put in inspirational efforts. New Zealand had to work harder than they expected.

Even after a late night out on Saturday, I was up early on Sunday to see the finale to this hard-fought tournament – expecting it to be an easy walk in the park for the Kiwis over a relaxing breakfast!  How wrong I was and something must have got lost in translation!

Tense? It was excruciating, a rugby rollercoaster that carried me, and everyone else watching along with it.  Not so relaxing a breakfast for me after all.

Was the Final the greatest game of Rugby Union ever?  It probably comes close. Not because of the scoreline, but because of a French team which no one gave a hope of winning the World Cup against the might of the All Blacks, coming so close to immortality.

So, probably the noisiest party in Auckland’s 170-year-old history is still on-going; and countless hangover headaches across the land will last long into this week – good for them!  This massive win might help to heal the wounds left by the Christchurch earthquake and the Pike River mining disaster of 2011.

The Rugby World Cup is now firmly established as one of the world’s premier sporting tournaments with a cumulative global television audience of over four billion!  Global brand Heineken has already confirmed their renewed sponsorship of the 2015 Finals in England, before this year’s tournament had even ended!

Digital media was an integral part of Heineken’s activation during the 2011 World Cup – entitled ‘This is the Game’. 

It included digital content featuring rugby legends Will Carling, Zinzan Brooke, Matt Burke, Scott Quinnell and Rob Henderson as well as entertainment and sporting celebrities like Stephen Fry and Rio Ferdinand. Fans have been able to engage with the content across YouTube, Facebook and Twitter (#TITG)

Heineken believe the RWC2015 in England will bring even further exciting and innovative on-line opportunities.  I have no doubt they are right.

….only four years to go before we find out and go through it all again here in England! 

I can’t wait.

Bloomin’ lovely

By Paul Faulds and Chris Rambridge

The days might be getting shorter and the leaves turning a nice shade of golden brown, but over at Westfield there’s still a feeling of summer in the air - or rather on the wall.

This ‘living poster’ was created by wine company Banrock Station to mark the launch of its new special edition wines, which will contribute £30,000 to Natural England’s campaign to enhance wildflower meadows across Britain.

Grown from the seeds of 800 British wild flowers, workers spent 12 hours carefully putting together the floral picture of wine being poured from a bottle.

And to make sure that all of their hard work didn’t wilt after a few days, passers-by were encouraged to water the poster via a working handpump. They could also scan a giant QR code to find our more.

Now that’s what we call fresh thinking.

Adidas Secret Popup Shops

One would initially think that only telling a few people about your new store was strongly counter intuitive. Adidas has, however, strongly proved otherwise. They have set up stores in Germany, Austria and Sitzerland and only given invitations to those deemed worthy via social networkign sites. The stores can be set uup in one day and sell the ‘Ransom’ and ‘Blue’ limited edition collections.

Nokia/Foursquare Gift machine

A really lovely idea by Nokia here. Check in with a hashtag, share it on twitter and receive a random prize. Simple. Effective. Prizes are as broad as chocolate, phone accessories and even new phones if you are really lucky.

Ikea’s Manland

IKEA in Australia have come up with a rather ingenious new idea - give men a play area while their wives shop. This was the brilliance behind Ikea’s Manland. Leave your husband in an area full of sports on TV, video games, arcades, unlimited hotdogs and drinks. Despite paying by the half hour, he may not want to leave, so you are given a buzzer to remind you to pick him up. 

Jude Leon, IKEA’s PR Manager, said:

It’s generally acknowledged that most men don’t enjoy shopping as much as women so we wanted to provide a place for the reluctant male to seek sanctuary from shopping stresses whilst allowing spouses to peruse IKEA at their leisure. We’ve listened to women jokingly ask for a male crèche as they’ve checked their children into our kids facility, SMALAND, so thought Father’s Day was a great opportunity to trial the grown up version in the form of MÄNLAND. Despite most men dreading a trip to the shops, we still attract a high proportion of male customers so we’re expecting the scheme to be a real success with both sexes.

Has the loss of Jobs shaken Apple to the core?

by Robbie Smith

Last week was one of the most eventful for Apple inc. ever; the main event being the death of their former CEO Steve Jobs. Not only was Jobs CEO of Apple, he was the co-founder, designer, developer and marketing brain behind their most successful and pioneering products – as we would say in Arc – he was a true Brand Activist

Another significant event for Apple was the announcement of the release of the iPhone 4 S - the 5^th generation of iPhone since its release in 2007. The latest iPhone has been a hugely popular topic of conversation, and sparked a massive wave of pre-ordering. The recently released sales figures have massively exceeded the predictions of many analysts, one of the main reasons the predictions were rather low was that everyone was expecting a brand new product called the iPhone 5 and what they have released is basically an improvement on the existing iPhone 4.

Despite the potential disappointment factor of iPhone 5 failing to materialise, the sales continued to rise – so how much was this down to the death of the great man? Often described as one of the greatest business minds and a pioneer in the technology industry – I believe Apple devotees were the reason for this huge surge in sales. As a devotee myself I thought it pertinent to remember some of his achievements through his years at Apple, he changed the way we live and work with his innovative products “He created things that people came to want more than anything else only by not trying to give them what they already wanted.” (A quote from the article ‘How Steve Jobs changed capitalism’ by Julian Baggini on the guardian.co.uk)

1976 - Apple I, the first computer Jobs’ created.

1977 - Apple II, the first mass produced Apple computer

1984 Macintosh, the first computer to have a mouse.

1998 - Apple iMac, known as the breakthrough product completely different from all computers at the time

2001 - First generation iPod, the most innovative way of listening to music since the walkman

2003 - Third generation iPod, reinventing the wheel, with the iconic scrolling wheel

2007 - First generation iPhone, the phone that sparked the Smart phone generation

2008 - Macbook Air, Thinnest laptop ever

2010 – iPad,  was a whole other class in the existing tablet market