Groupon-related thoughts on the future of advertising and e-commerce
There’s been a lot of debate about Groupon around its initial public offering, and I find the Groupon bears to be more persuasive than the Groupon bulls. That said, there’s a Groupon-optimism argument I want to share at length, by Steve Cheney, because it outlines some possibilities for the continued evolution of analytics.
… First with massive creation of context: location/proximity, stored preferences, conversational sentiment, social indicators such as groups, and a bunch of stuff that’s temporally and geographically relevant to you and your group in the real world. I’m talking massive amounts of data.
He’s right, although the debate remains open as to who gets to control information about you and in what format it will be shared.
… a future time when a restaurant’s staff will say to you “let me consult the tablet” to make decisions in the restaurant. Metaphorically-speaking.
Kind of like how you consult your iPhone when you need to do something in your physical world. The employee “consults the tablet” and pushes a lever to bring in some customers – it’s a little slow in the restaurant for a Thursday night. Meanwhile you are “searching” for somewhere to go to dinner that night with 4 of your friends. This is the future of self-serve at the merchant level.
An hour later your group shows up, dines, and receives the check. They bring the bill to your table in one of those standard-looking black folios—except it has an embedded NFC tag. You pay through a credit card linked to your mobile phone. Unbeknownst to the waiter, you purchased that deal in real time 1 hour before you went to dinner and get 20% off, right after assembling your group, planning, deciding, and purchasing on the go.
A lot of stuff is mixed together here, but basically the idea is to take something like real-time ad matching and extend it to the sale of — well, of just about anything, at least any discretionary/impulse items. That’s big.
So the real end-goal for daily deal sites is in assembling a marketplace and exchange that has enough inventory and users to support these types of new online to offline behaviors at massive scale. And if Groupon doesn’t figure it out, someone else will. There is way more money to be made in offline commerce than there is in online commerce. Everyone knows that by now.
The reality is we’re in inning 2 or 3 of deals and local commerce. We’re moving away from these static one-time deals toward a marketplace for your attention in the physical world. And someone is going to make a lot of money off of it.
Many people — including a large fraction of all males 🙂 — like to have a good idea of what they’ll buy before they ever get to a store. Sure, you may wind up walking the aisles yourself rather than messaging your order ahead, leaving you with some flexibility. But even bricks-and-mortar retailing will need to be intimately connected with consumers’ computing and communication devices.
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This clinches it. “I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus” is a documentary.