We have arrived at the point in time when digital ad-targeting practices hit the real world, starting with these highly personalized ads in the cooler and freezer aisles at your local pharmacy-grocery hybrid.Īnd whether or not this particular project takes off exactly in the way its CEO is promising, you can definitely expect motion sensors, heavy surveillance, and eye tracking to become a common part of the brick-and-mortar shopping experience. Posters are kind of no big deal - or have been, until now. You see a poster for a deal on ketchup, and you quickly evaluate whether you need ketchup or you tune it out. Posters in a grocery store, with images of products on them, are ads, and they are shown to everyone. Maybe it’s comforting to you that you will never be alone, even while shopping for frozen TGI Friday’s apps? Or maybe you can convince yourself it’s comforting, since you have no other choice.Ĭoca-Cola, Pepsi, Nestle, MillerCoors, and Anheuser-Busch are already Cooler Screens customersįacebook ad targeting and the intricacies of how our behavior is tracked across the web are still murky concepts, but we all understand physical posters. ![]() The claims may be a little out there, but the doors exist, and they’re going to be in major businesses. ![]() The company currently has only $700,000 in funding, according to Crunchbase, but Cooler Screens counts Microsoft, Foxconn, and the door manufacturer Dover as technology partners. The doors are installed at no cost to store owners, in exchange for the privilege of selling ads on them. (Cooler Screens did not respond to Vox’s request for comment.)Ĭooler Screens uses the same pro-ad-targeting argument as Mark Zuckerberg: people shouldn’t mind if it results in “relevant” adsĬooler Screens has reportedly booked ads from “more than 15 of the 20 top consumer packaged goods companies,” which presumably means 16 or 17 of the 20 top consumer packaged goods companies? Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nestle, MillerCoors, and Anheuser-Busch are given as examples, and it’s implied that ice cream brands are another target. And that the first Walgreens pilot location in Chicago saw “double-digit, same-store sales growth for the Cooler Screens section as compared to the rest of the pharmacy.” Also that in the first two months of the pilot, sales of products advertised on the doors grew “more than 20 percent” year over year. ![]() Cooler Screens makes a lot of bold claims throughout its first big trade publication profile, including that, since the doors don’t store any data and the data is anonymized, there is no reason to disclose to in-store customers that they are being watched and manipulated. The screens use this information to select which ads to display and which promotions to show.Īccording to the Fast Company piece, they can even figure out “your emotional response” to individual products. The new freezer doors have cameras, motion sensors, and eye-tracking capabilities, which allow them to guess a shopper’s gender and age, as well as note how much time they spend looking at individual products. Walgreens is participating in a pilot of Cooler Screens, a Chicago-based startup that uses Microsoft technology to convert the typical frozen food aisle into a tunnel of personalized, super-targeted ads, as Fast Company’s Katharine Schwab reported Wednesday.
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