NM Incite, a collaboration of Nielsen and McKinsey, this morning will unveil a new version of social media conversation tracker BuzzMetrics Exchange that will enable marketers, agencies and others to monitor “natural language” conversations and to listen to them globally, or at “hyper-local” levels. The new features, which are powered by uberVU, will enable social media analysts to utilize the natural language feature in more than 50 languages, and to filter them down to “city-level” locations. Details of the alliance with uberVU, and plans for other enhancements planned for later this year, will be unveiled later today, but the new features will include upgrades to BuzzMetrics dashboard that the companies say will enhance the “workflow” of analysts utilizing the databases. Among other things, the new interface design includes a nifty mapping feature that will enable users to look at results by countries, regions and cities with a “heat-map” style tool showing the density of conversations around a natural-language topic, and to even break it down by various demographics, such as gender. “Social media spans demographics and geography for a simple reason,” states said Amit Seth, executive vice president-global media products for NM Incite. “It connects people, ideas and brands easily and universally.” The enhancements come as a torrent of new data products and services rush into the social media analytics marketplace, and as some emerging players begin to scale. On Wednesday, big “brand graph” analysis firm 33Across, for example, announced the acquisition of TYNT, the largest collector of so-called “interest graph” data on the Web, creating a merged company that it claims has data on more users than anyone, including Facebook, Microsoft and Google, and presumably, Nielsen/McKinsey too.
Tablets have become the consumer's fourth screen, especially among those with smartphones. Techies with smartphones continue to use tablets at a higher rate. Those in the United States -- at 17% -- are among the highest, followed by Japan at 11%, and the United Kingdom at 10%, according to Google. The data appears to fall into line with AdWords tools allowing marketers to add WiFi ad targeting. Google also added the ability to target by mobile operating system in AdWords. The research -- which Google conducted in two phases during 2011, in January and February followed by September and October -- finds consumers shifting from feature phones or smartphones for Internet access. In fact, they use smartphones more than desktop or laptop computers in the U.S., UK, Germany, France, and Japan. Germany had the biggest increase in smartphone owners using their device for daily Internet access, jumping from 39% to 49%. Japan had the highest percentage accessing the Internet daily on their smartphone, at 88%. A little more than two-thirds of smartphone users in the U.S. -- and more than half of smartphone users in the UK -- access the mobile Internet daily. Research firm eMarketer estimates mobile advertising spending in the U.S. reached $1.45 billion in 2011, up 89% from $769.6 billion in 2010. This year, U.S. mobile ad spending will grow 80% to $2.61 billion. The revised U.S. mobile growth forecast of 47% to $1.8 billion in 2012 -- up from $1.2 billion last year -- reflects a stream of new market data from major advertising publishers and research firms, as well as better-than-expected performance from Google. Google's share of overall U.S. mobile ad revenue rose 51.7%, or about $750 million, in 2011. The company isn't the only one to see success in mobile. Apple's iAd platform, an ad network, generated slightly more than $90 million in revenue last year to take a 6.4% share of overall U.S mobile ad revenue. Millennial earned $90.9 million, for a 6.3% share. As more marketers explore and launch mobile ad campaigns based on the increased use of smartphones and tablets by consumers, do the ads impact purchases? A mobile study of 1,300 respondents conducted between Dec. 26, 2011 and Jan. 11, 2012 from digital marketing firm InsightExpress sheds light on ad recall and perception. Men ages 18 to 29 are more likely to become aware of having seen mobile ads, are more positive toward them, and are more likely to consider them new and different compared with traditional and digital ads. Of men who participated in the study, 32% said they use their mobile phones versus a computer Internet connection or walking into a store more often when purchasing items, versus 12% of women in the same age group. Men are more likely to search for an item on mobile. About 65% searched for a product in a nearby store using their phone. In general, young men use mobile more for information-gathering than women. While 59% of men use their mobile phone to find better prices on items, 49% use their mobile phone to search for an item to find reviews, and 41% use their mobile phone to take a picture or send it to someone.
Can you accurately measure the impact of online video advertising on offline consumer purchases? Videology is going to try. The ad platform, formerly known as TidalTV, is entering into dual partnerships with database marketing and behavioral targeting services provider I-Behavior and Kantar Shopcom, which runs a database containing information from 231 million consumers across 270 CPG, retail, travel, lodging and services categories. The goal is to help marketers reach users based on their demographic makeup or in-store activity, explained Kevin Haley, Chief Scientist at Videology. “What advertisers really want to know is if their advertising moves soap off the shelves,” says Haley. He says the ability to provide advertisers with ongoing, offline ROI measurement should have a "significant impact on advertising strategies within the digital video space.” With the three-way partnership, advertisers can target offline purchase-based segments across Videology’s in-stream video network of more than 80 million consumers, Haley promised. Meanwhile, given the volume of data that will result from the enterprise, Haley sees an opportunity for analysis of purchase behavior at the brand level, including increases in sales volume, frequency of purchase and retail penetration. Launched in late 2007, Videology was known to the world as TidalTV until earlier this month. The name change was meant to convey a more video- and technology-heavy image. To coincide with renaming, Videology recently debuted a sell-side platform to complement the capabilities currently offered to media agencies. Videology is competing for a share of a vastly expanding and competitive market. eMarketer estimates that by 2015, 76% of Web users -- or 195.5 million people -- will be watching online video each month. In the same period, the research firm predicts online video advertising spending will surge from $1.97 billion to $5.71 billion.
So, here’s one to mull: According to an extensive survey of more than 4,200 adults, every one of them bought some sort of consumer electronics device during the holiday season. That’s 100%. And not a “margin-of-error” 100%, either. A deep-dive into the survey results revealed that every one of the 4,200 people surveyed (from a representative demographic of the United States, median annual income of $50,000) answered in the affirmative when asked whether they had bought a consumer electronics device during their holiday shopping. “I was floored,” Janet Eden-Harris, chief marketing officer at Market Force Information, which conducted the survey in January 2012, tells Marketing Daily. “It was a representative mix of consumers. It’s a representative sample [of demographics] and income levels. And every single one said they bought some kind of consumer electronics device.” Video games and gear and televisions and accessories led the purchases. Thirty-two percent of consumers said they purchased video games, gear and accessories, while 31% said they bought TVs, DVDs and other equipment. Smartphones and digital cameras were tied for the third-most-popular gifts, at 24%, while 23% of survey respondents bought a computer. Despite the hype, iPads were cited by only 21% of respondents, while Kindles were cited by 20%. “If we think about what the category has done over the last decade or 20 years, so many [devices] that didn’t exist before have become a must-have item and so many items have been incorporated into our daily routine,” Eden-Harris says. “They aren’t luxuries anymore; they’re must-haves.” When it came to making those purchases, people generally preferred to head to a brick-and-mortar retailer instead of making online purchases. Among those surveyed, 100% said they bought at least one device from a retail store, while only 35% said they made a purchase online. The reasons people preferred retail locations included the ability to walk out of a store with a purchase, in-store promotions, to avoid shipping costs and to get a personal demonstration of the device. When it comes to those in-store purchases, the sales associate plays a huge role in a consumer’s decision. According to the survey, more than three-quarters of shoppers said they were helped by a salesperson. Forty-four percent of them said they received a specific product recommendation from that salesperson, and 85% bought the product that was recommended. “It tells you how critically important … having a knowledgeable salesperson is,” Eden Harris says.
Fueled by new technologies and rapid device adoption, total U.S. spending on mobile media is expected to grow 30% this year to $55 billion, according to a new forecast presented Thursday at MediaPost’s Mobile Insider Summit. That estimate from market research firm PQ Media combines mobile revenue generated both from providing content and access and marketing and advertising. The former includes spending on mobile data services and content delivered exclusively to mobile devices. The latter spans everything from banner ads, in-game ads and mobile search to mobile coupons, e-mail marketing and 2D codes. To date, mobile access and content is the larger market, estimated at $39 billion in 2011 compared to $3.4 billion for mobile advertising and marketing. Of that $3.4 billion, advertising -- display ads, search, and video ads, for example -- amounts to $1.8 billion, slightly more than the $1.6 billion devoted to mobile marketing formats like coupons, apps, and sponsored Tweets. Starting from a smaller base, mobile marketing and advertising has grown about twice as rapidly as content and access spending: 53.7% to 27.8% from 2010 to 2011. That pattern will continue this year, with marketing/advertising spiking 49.5% versus 28.3% on the content/access side, according to the PQ Media study, which also covered social media spending. The firm estimated total U.S. mobile and social revenue at $45.4 billion in 2011 -- up 30.2%, with combined spending in the two areas expected to account for 10% of all communications revenue ($1.4 trillion) by 2016. Mobile media alone is projected to reach the $100 billion mark by 2015. In his presentation, PQ Media CEO Patrick Quinn noted that mobile media is the fastest media to hit $1 billion -- it has taken five years, compared to 16 for the Internet. Looking more closely at mobile ad spending in 2011, the study showed that streaming video, search and in-game ads made up the bulk (68%) of spending. Dollars going to in-game advertising have ramped up especially fast, more than doubling last year. On the marketing side, SMS-based contests accounted for nearly half (48%) of spending, with marketing apps the next-biggest format, at 17%. Location-based services, mobile coupons, apps and click-to-call marketing are among the fastest- growing areas. Quinn noted that smartphone penetration, now about 35% to 40% in the U.S., will be a key factor driving growth in the next five years. During that time, the 60%/40% split between business and consumer smartphone users will be reversed as the devices spread to a broader audience. Rising adoption of tablets, the buildout of 4G networks, and increasing time spent with all mobile devices will also be among the main growth drivers in the coming years. Even so, familiar obstacles remain in mobile growth. Those include saturation in the feature phone market, high access fees slowing smartphone growth and device and network fragmentation that continue to make it more difficult to buy mobile advertising and marketing. “The biggest challenge here is that there are 100 competing advertising and marketing platforms, including 17 just in mobile,” said Quinn. That overwhelming array of options leaves “a lot of marketers confused and flustered.” He added that tech-centric media and ad executives on both coasts forget that most American consumers don’t have homes filled with the latest gadgets, suggesting that expectations for mainstream adoption should be tempered.
Magazine pages became increasingly popular places for marketers to slap QR codes last year. A survey of the top 100 U.S. magazines by circulation found the number of “mobile action codes” climbed from 352 in the first- quarter issues to 1,899 in the fourth quarter, for a record total of 4,468 in 2011. The study by mobile marketing firm Nellymoser underscores that advertisers drove the growth of QR codes in magazine. It notes that in January 2011 there were seven advertising codes for each editorial one, and by September, that ratio had jumped to 25:1. The number of magazine titles with at least one action code hit 90% in May for the first time, and rose to 96% in July. Nellymoser points to the percentage of magazine pages that include QR codes as a better gauge for tracking adoption because the statistic isn’t as likely to be affected by seasonality or skipped issues. The proportion of pages with codes rose steadily from 3.55% in March to 8.36% in December. The average number of codes per issue roughly tripled in 2011, rising from 2.3 in the first quarter to 6.5 by year’s end. Nearly all of the codes printed in the top 100 magazines in the fourth quarter were either QR codes (72%) or Microsoft Tags (25%). So how were the codes put to use? The study found that advertisers and editors are no longer creating codes that send readers to a desktop site. Instead, the goal is to engage users with branding campaigns and product demos, m-commerce initiatives, social media and sweepstakes for building customer databases. More than half (54%) of action codes featured video for showcasing products, offering behind-the-scenes footage or how-to guides. Nearly a third (30%) of codes were used for list-building, 23% enabled sharing a video or product information via social properties, like Facebook and Twitter, and 19% linked to an e-commerce store. When it came to ad categories, the study showed nearly 40% of the action codes used in magazine advertising came from companies in three industries: beauty, home and fashion. Companies in these segments also led the way in codes placed in retail stores. In the fourth quarter, electronics vendors, such as Bose and Intel, joined the list of top 10 brands in terms of code usage. The top 10 magazines by circulation accounted for 28% of all codes (1,255), and most of those were titles targeting women, like InStyle and Lucky. Looking at placement, 90% of codes appeared at the bottom of the page, the traditional place for ads with calls to action. By the fourth quarter, seven out of 10 action codes were accompanied by information that described what happens after the scan. “This is considered by many to be a best practice and follows the pattern of many other calls to action,” according to Nellymoser. At the same time, the firm noted a shift away from embellishments, with few codes sporting an adjacent icon. It noted that in the second quarter, for example, nearly half of all codes included an instruction for how to download a code reader. That figure had dropped to 23% by the end of 2011. And hardly any codes were accompanied by an SMS campaign for people who did not have action code readers.
Los Angeles-based digital agency Fuel Industries has realigned its 12-year focus on branded entertainment and general marketing to target the youth market through interactive campaigns such as gaming. To accomplish the goal, senior executive Andrew Wing and creative guru Mike Burns have been named co-CEOs. Burns said the company will build campaigns that engage today's youth, who want to consume content through game play on sites like McDonald's Europe HappyStudio.com. Fuel has been working with McDonald's since 2007. A year ago, the company won a bid to build a virtual world marketing platform in Europe. It's available in 40 countries and has been translated in almost as many languages. Integrated into the virtual worlds are characters from movies such as "Tin Tin," "Puss In Boots" and "Ice Age 4," along with content from popular toys like Hot Wheels. Clients also include Google, Electronic Arts and Microsoft. As part of its entertainment division, Fuel launched its own property in October on the Sony PlayStation Network called Sideway New York, an action platform game for PS3 and PCs. Fuel has been developing similar properties for global brands since 1999. Wing joined Burns at Fuel in 2011 as chairman of the executive committee after stints as president and CEO of Cantor Entertainment, a division of Cantor Fitzgerald, and president and CEO of Nielsen Entertainment. The combined leadership has overseen the evolution of Fuel’s business model and the elevation of Fuel’s Youth Engagement brand. Michael Plotkin, former CTO at Electronics Arts, who holds a Ph.D. in computer science, has been named CTO at Fuel. Chief Strategy Officer Jeff Roach, who guides strategic planning and youth consumer insights, served in similar roles at youth marketing agencies Youthography and Glitteration.
Addressing a touchy topic for consumers and their advocates, the Mobile Marketing Association has released new guidelines on application privacy. According to the MMA, the completed guidelines address the industry’s core privacy issues with regard to current data processing standards. Mobile app developers knew that industry guidelines were inevitable, and even beneficial to their businesses. According to Greg Stuart, CEO of MMA Global, they only asked that the policy language be clear, transparent and easy for consumers to understand. The new guidelines “gives the app development community the meaningful support they need,” said Stuart. The MMA Mobile Application Privacy Policy was created by the MMA Privacy & Advocacy Committee, which is co-chaired by Alan Chapell, president of Chapell & Associates, and Fran Maier, president of TRUSTe. Key issues include annotated guidance on core privacy principles and consumer-friendly language for developers to consider; ways to inform users on how data is obtained and used; and guidance on security and confidentiality of information. “Privacy policies are a key consumer disclosure tool for app developers and important to establishing and maintaining consumer trust,” said Chapell. The policy couldn’t have come soon enough; there are currently billions of apps downloaded per year, according to the MMA. As of June 2011, over 425,000 individual apps were available via the Apple App Store, and more than 200,000 were available for Android devices. The new privacy policy follows a broader set of mobile ad guidelines, which were released late last year. The goal, according to the MMA, was to streamline mobile ad buying by creating six standard display units for mobile phones, as well as recommended ad sizes for tablets.
Web strategist Jeremiah Owynang recently tweeted a story from launch.is, which discussed a Windows 7.5 campaign that Microsoft ran. In this promotion, Microsoft collaborated with Klout to help promote the Windows Phone 7.5 OS by offering a free phone as a perk to users influential about Microsoft and technology. Users were also invited to an exclusive party where Microsoft showed off its new phones, as these influencers enjoyed cocktails and live music. This marketing push by the software giant illustrates a growing trend by marketers looking to leverage the “influence” of a select group of people to promote their products and services. Unfortunately, this approach also introduces a number of serious questions. By devising clever algorithms, companies like Klout, PeerIndex, and PeopleBrowsr, have unearthed a new breed of influencers for brands to use as marketing vehicles. What makes these individuals “influential?” When you boil it down, they have earned their influence through high activity on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. They may be popular, but are they really “influencers?” More importantly, will their recommendations truly steer the brand preference or buying behavior of the masses? Not as much as we think -- and here’s why.Mobile phones are one of the many products that fall under the “considered purchase” category, meaning that people typically do a fair amount of research before they buy. That said, consumers will typically look to experts, or in this case, mobile phone experts (i.e. bloggers and journalists), to help them make the most informed purchase decisions. While we don’t know exactly Microsoft's target, other than broadly defined technology and Microsoft influencers, my gut tells me that a majority weren’t mobile phone experts. This isn’t a jab at Microsoft’s marketing team or efforts, but a clarification of how an influencer is defined. An alterative to looking at individuals with juiced up social media activity, is to navigate toward something more natural and credible. In other words, move the needle from the popular kids who just talk about technology, to the geeks, bloggers and thought leaders, who create objective editorial content that is engaging, organic and authentic.In many cases, we are already seeing this strategy take hold in the marketing landscape. Rich Brome (Phonescoop), Marin Perez (Intomobile) and Noah Kravitz (Technobuffalo) are all influencers in their space. They are influencers because they educate the masses by writing engaging editorial that helps people make better purchasing decisions. While they may have a bevy of followers on Twitter and Facebook, the key to their influence revolves around the content they create and the social media engagement that content generates. Marketers can harness this content within their executions because amplifying the positive opinions of respected experts will have a powerful impact brand preference.As such, rather than basing influence on follower counts and social media activity, marketers should re-shift their focus to identify their brands’ most influential authors and leverage their content to support the brand story. The brand story is always more believable and compelling, when a respected third party authority tells it. The opinions of these influencers will have a greater effect on brand perception and buying behavior, which, if used properly, will help drive sales.There is no denying that brands will continue to invest in influencer marketing programs; however, they must realize that influence goes beyond a score. It is about using content to establish a deeper and more intelligent connection with an audience. And it is those authors who are the true influencers that deserve attention.
1. This is the time of the girl – we’ve seen it coming, and it’s here. Global organizations focusing on girl “upliftment,” serving future family “upliftment” is working. There are now more girls in U.S. universities than boys. 2. Address the “missing in media” puzzle.Geena Davis Institute on Gender Media: Myth: Gender imbalance issues have gotten better. Fact: Statistically, there has been little forward movement for girls in media for six decades. 3. Youngster media queens are naturally on the rise. “It wouldn’t be fair for all the girls to buy princess and all the boys to buys superheroes cause… [some] girls want superheroes.” Check out 4-year old Riley on Marketing. 4. Know it and show it: Girls are into what they are into. They are a self-feeding society. Businesses that are on the outside need to get inside. 5. Sharers, creators and carers. They’ll share the “wow” stuff, and if such stuff isn’t out there, they’ll create it. 6. Real, extreme, & fantasy. Girls want to know about real girls doing real things (changing the world), and they want fantasy and extreme. They want it all. 7. Media-savvy stalkers. They stalk friends and brands. Propel them with obsessive love options of fun and value. 8. Playing in the reinvention realm. Who are you talking to? Are you talking to her online or offline personality? Everything is an evolving continuum to a girl. This is how she learns. 9. They are about today and tomorrow, what’s next? The future is theirs, and they want to inhabit it now. Vintage is a different story, the past is enthralling as reinvintage, an iconographic symbol that represents something youth can stylistically own, understand and share. 10. Generation of change. This is the change generation of all change generations; this generation is in tremendous flux. With it, our world is in flux. As a result, it is important to give a positive, empowering, emotional voice to youth, to girls and women. The common voice of girl in society is new and needs amplifying. For insights into how and why, I went to Jody Turner, trend hunter and founder of CultureofFuture.com. “Each generation can say they are ‘the’ change generation,” she says. “Yet, the current youth generation has a confluence of change we have not experienced. The combination of socio-digitech and socio- economic shifts has created a ‘super charged’ situation of change. Are schools and colleges prepared to educate for this future change? Enter the media-empowered native… the young one who is teaching us (and themselves) a thing or two about designing their lives forward.” We predict: (1) An aging downward market influence as digi-natives find the best how-to info, best deals and best products online for their friends and families. (2) A shift toward complex social overlays with pop-up engagements becoming more fluid. Youth are creating a self-feeding society. So how do businesses on the outside engage? Youths are sharers, engagers and co-creators. They are looking to remix interesting info from all points of entry. How to stay relevant?
The other day at Best Buy, I encountered my first sighting of a mobilized tag-team couple. In the lead, the wife picked up cameras and accessories and recited the brands and model numbers, while the husband did mobile lookups on Amazon and barked out prices. These two had it down to an efficient science and a great division of labor. She was curating choices and he was acting as a kind of C3PO digital assistant. What they didn’t seem to know or care about was that Best Buy itself has one of the best in-store apps -- and in my experience, many store clerks there will try to match a price you show them from a rival. The challenge for Best Buy will be to communicate all of these opportunities to customers like this woman and her C3PO as they walk in the door. The battle for shoppers’ hearts and minds used to take place mainly outside of the store itself, in the promotional campaigns that drove people to a brick-and-mortar choice. Now it is a ground game. Who can get shopper consciousness in the store? How can the retailers add value to their own mobile experience so the mobilized consumer defaults to their store’s app or mobile site? Self-checkout may be one unique attribute a retailer can bring to the table. For many of us, the idea of using cell phones to make an m-payment in the aisle, bypass checkout, and walk out the door with the item seemed a bit daft at first. But late last year, Apple helped highlight the model by adding an EasyPay function to its own app for select in-store purchases. Apple was far from the first to do m-checkout, however. For example, Boston-based toy and baby gear retailer Magic Beans has an AisleBuyer app that enables in-store shoppers to scan items in the store to get more information, put it into their mobile and real shopping carts and buy on the spot. They simply show their virtual receipt to a clerk as they leave the store. “On Black Friday we did 18% of all transactions at Magic Beans stores,” says Andrew Paradise, CEO of AisleBuyer, the m-shopping engine that built the app. AisleBuyer has been doing this for over a year with Magic Beans. Meanwhile, a number of larger retailers continue the long, slow process of ramping up with in-store buying. But in year-over-year comparisons at Magic Beans, the number of purchases made using the app grew 285% on Black Friday. Apparently, long waiting lines are a great motivator for people adopting the app. One of the reasons that AisleBuyer saw this growth at the Magic Beans chain was that both companies learned how to better manage the in-store experience over the past year. Not surprisingly, education and signage are key to app adoption at the retail level. You need to let buyers know that their in-store experience can be improved. Paradise says that having a salesperson at the entrance introducing the app is an important piece of this. The staff needs to know how the app works and needs to be versed in walking a customer through it. Paradise has introduced a companion “mClerk” app just for the store staff so they have an additional layer of information and can work in tandem with the mobilized shopper. The consumer-facing app has also been enhanced by pulling in more product info from Google Shopping. For smaller chains like Magic Beans this is important, because they can’t always generate enough content on their own. One of the upsides to this technique is that it reasserts the clerk’s role as a real authority. As Paradise points out, both the Internet -- and now, mobile -- have flipped the old equation. Now consumers often know more about a product than the staff. This allows the clerk to work in concert with the user and in some ways, to stay a step ahead. Also helpful is putting up signs about the app and its functionality behind the real checkout line so waiting customers can see there is an alternative. In more than a year of working with the in-store app experience, Paradise says consumers clearly are getting past the fear factor of self-checkout. Willingness to engage the model has increased exponentially. But what is also apparent is that these features are not just defensive maneuvers that help a retailer retain customers. They increase business. One interesting behavior, Paradise finds, is that the act of scanning a product in-store demonstrates a high degree of purchase intent. “About 60% of all items scanned were purchased,” he says. That is an especially important revelation. It means that once a retailer has someone actively engaged in the research process, that shopper clearly is within inches of a sale where promotions and upselling are important. In fact, says Paradise, “we upsold 19% over the point of sale.” Not only did on-the-spot coupons help to drive purchase, but the retailer was able to effectively cross-sell other related items to increase average order size. How all this translates from a boutique shop like Magic Beans -- where people may be purchasing a few items at a time -- to a large-scale retailer is anyone’s guess, but we will know shortly, Paradise says. Major grocery chains are about to deploy the solution in thousands of stores in the next two quarters. At last week’s retail industry Big Show, AisleBuyer released a version 2.0 of its engine that includes an SDK retailers can use to craft their own apps or integrate specific functions like self-checkout into their existing apps. Self-checkout is yet another mobile empowerment of the shopper. On one level, retailers may fear losing control of the retail experience to the app-enhanced consumer. But that battle may already have been lost, both by mass mobilization, as well as the general cluelessness of much of their staff and the inadequacies of the retail experience. Mobile tools should be seen as a way to reconnect with consumers in the store. Here the brand can speak directly to shoppers, guide them through a process and the store itself, and offer genuinely valuable incentives along the way. Isn’t this better than the current retail experience of being harassed by a zombie stalker clerk (“Can I help you find something?”) who ends up not knowing the answer when you do have a question? Yup, there are apps for that.