Mobile phones to inform customers of what to eat at point of purchase

This could be interesting for Weight Watchers clients or potentially even on board a P&O Cruise, recommending appropriate cocktails for each part of the ship??? Thanks AFN for this food for thought.

Mobile phones to inform customers of what to eat at point of purchase

American-based WebDiet, Inc. has created a program which provides consumers with customised meal suggestions at the point of purchase based on the needs, wants and location of the customer. It is a new smartphone-based service to help people make smarter eating choices and improve their health, according to the creators. WebDiet is the first and only service to proactively send customers specific and dynamic meal suggestions, directly to their email and mobile devices immediately before time of purchase. Meal recommendations sent throughout the day are customised to users’ diet goals, based on what they’ve already eaten and their remaining calories for the day.

WebDiet utilises wireless, GPS and smartphone technologies, including iPhones, to bring WebDiet’s unique real-time Meal-by-Meal Guidance system to the palm of the consumer’s hand. To help attain weight and health goals, meal suggestions are sent directly before meal times based on personal settings and preferences, and can be custom-configured to support restricted calorie diets, low carb, low sodium, vegetarian, kosher and more diet choices.

“WebDiet gives consumers a smart and easy way to eat better, keep track of what they eat, and get healthy — even on the go — anytime, anywhere,” said Chris Shipley, executive producer of the DEMO Conferences. “Its innovative technology integrates wireless services, GPS, location-based services (LBS) and smartphones — and the company has a profitable business model that I had not seen in this category.”

The company believes the technology is vital to provide consumers with more information about what they should be eating at a time when obesity is on the rise.”Now with fast food popularity growing and our overweight and obesity epidemic on the rise in America, helping people to eat smarter is an urgent task,” said Craig Gold, CEO and co-founder of WebDiet, Inc. “Everyone knows our health depends largely on the choices we make in what we eat, and how much we eat. Research proves that keeping track of what we eat is the best method of losing weight. WebDiet not only makes keeping track easy to do, we go a step further, giving users dynamic real-time meal recommendations based on their daily intake requirements and diet goals.”
Users can select from restaurant and chain-specific meals, standardised meals available by food type and grocery stores, meals made at home, or from The WebDiet Collection(SM) of custom meal suggestions.

The collection of options offers thousands of meal ideas that can be made at home or custom ordered from many chain restaurant and fast food outlets, allowing users to eat at their local favourites while also helping them achieve their health and diet goals, the company suggests.

WebDiet has arranged deals with some food retailers to provide discounts and a linking of the technology with electronic ordering facilities of the retailer appears to be the next step.

Mobile technology is suddenly being linked with food retail around the world, with, for example, i-phones providing a program in the US which directs consumers to suitable nearby restaurants and mobile phones being tested to house credit card information to enable in-store purchases simply with a mobile phone.

See here http://www.ausfoodnews.com.au/2008/09/10/mobile-phones-to-inform-customers-of-what-to-eat-at-point-of-purchase.html for the original post.

Pot Noodle - the musical

Thanks to Gerry for sharing the musical love, found at The Guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/21/advertising

Now it's Pot Noodle: The Musical

The world of Pot Noodle, a brand that made a virtue of the catchphrase "slag of all snacks", is to be turned into a musical comedy at this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Pot Noodle's ad agency Mother London has been developing a stage production - Pot Noodle: The Musical - based on some of the creative concepts used in advertising the snack in recent years and aims to dish up a "smorgasbord of comedy".

The show is set in the "idyllic all-singing, all-dancing Pot Noodle factory", where workers "pluck Pot Noodles fresh from trees, bottle feed and show them a whole heap of tender loving care".

It follows the story of the hero Steve, who tries to woo Sandie and overthrow the "bloated overlord" of the Pot Noodle factory, Allan Little, who has killed his brother in a bid to siphon off money to "spend on fast cars and loose women of virtue".

Little has a "beastly asthma suffering henchman" called Flick Ferdinando.

The show, which will run at the Assembly in Edinburgh from July 31 to August 25, has drawn creatively on the songs and themes that have run through Mother's recent un-PC Pot Noodle TV campaigns.

In the musical Digger, who has just fled from his wedding, and the hero Steve walk down the street singing the "Pact song" from the Pot Noodle ad about never putting a woman before mates.

"We can stay up late till dawn, watching classic vintage porn," the duo sing. "We can scratch our balls with pride, our man breasts don't need to hide."

The idea of a benevolent Pot Noodle world first appeared with a TV campaign featuring a fictitious Welsh town of noodle miners.

And the irreverent songs that will feature in the Fringe production have come from the recent "Pot Noodle says" ad campaign.

The campaign also featured two crooners spoofing Meatloaf's Bat out of Hell and a 1980s power ballad with lines praying for women to be "easy, simple and hassle-free" like the snack.

Mother is no stranger to extending brands beyond traditional TV advertising. Earlier this year the agency produced a feature film funded by Eurostar with Shane Meadows, the award-winning director of This Is England, which won top prize at the Edinburgh Film Festival.

The film, entitled Somers Town, is named after an area near King's Cross in north London and tells of the friendship between two teenagers, one of whom is the son of an immigrant working on the new Eurostar terminal.

The new billboard - Advertising in store windows

Selling Ad Space Into Store Windows: The New Billboard Business

As marketers and media buyers scramble for more street-level advertising space in big cities, store windows are emerging as a new kind of billboard business. Store operators and building owners are going for the idea because it turns underused window space into cash. A growing number of marketers like it because new technology can make window advertisements three dimensional and interactive -- and more likely to directly engage pedestrians.
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Again, thanks to AdAge for this insight into the newest way that advertising will start to invade our lives and our sanity... although I do think that the interactive 3D animations would be fun and could hopefully provide some higher purpose. Combine this space with the technology of billboards with eyes* that I posted an article about ("Billboards that look back" June 2) a few weeks ago, and it is also a highly targeted media.

*These 'eyes' are cameras that capture data about passers-by, e.g gender, approx. age, etc

http://adage.com/brightcove/lineup.php?lineup=1266084202

Inspiration for TrueLocal - iPhone applications

This is just some digital food for thought for our TrueLocal clients, thanks to Kelsey Group Blogs:

UrbanSpoon Creates Local Discovery Engine for the iPhone

UrbanSpoon is one of the first companies to announce a local search iPhone app (others are here). The application acts almost like a local restaurant eight-ball that lets users define cuisine price or other factors, before shaking the device to see what nearby eatery pops up.

This takes advantage of the iPhone’s accelerometer (the thing that can tell when the device is upright or on its side), and GPS capability.

“With the the iPhone [software development kit] you can get access to the accelerometer and access to GPS and maps,” says co-founder Ethan Lowry. “We looked at all of the other apps which were either games or practical applications. We thought it would be good to do something that is a hybrid of both.”

The novelty and appeal of the 8-ball feature makes it part search and part discovery — an interplay that’s found some successful online models and could be ripe for mobile local search applications like Loopt. In this way the application is almost like StumbleUpon for mobile restaurant search. Like StumbleUpon, results will be part random and part based on what is highest rated (and closest).

“On our website, we have rating information so for the iPhone search, what we do is look at the 200 closest restaurants,” says Lowry. “There is a random factor but also a ratings factor. When you shake the phone it will tend to come back with one of the best restaurants around.”

In the future, social or personal criteria could come into play for registered users of the site that have predefined their food preferences or favorite spots (even more like StumbleUpon). In this way, the application could serve as a promotional tool for the online service, as it’s a fun application that could be a hook to drive online use and registration on Urbanspoon.com

“There are other things we can build in like if you attach your identity to your iphone then we can do things like favor things on your wish list,” says Lowry. “There are lots of things we can do to customize it.”

There will also be some control over just how random results can be. The application allows users to lock down any one of the spinning wheels that represent the variables in a restaurant search (cuisine, price, etc.). This comes in handy if you know you want Italian food for example, but are willing to roll the dice with other factors.

“The randomness is a critical part of it being a game,” says Lowry. “At the same time you might want a little variety within certain confines.”

The application will be free in order to promote the online service, and available on the iPhone App store when it launches next month. You’ll have to wait till then to get the best use out of it anyway, when the (GPS-compatible) 3G iPhone launches. Until then, you can watch the video demo here.

http://blog.kelseygroup.com/index.php/2008/06/19/urbanspoon-creates-local-discovery-engine-for-the-iphone/

Skype 4.0

A Redesign at Skype
By BRAD STONE, NY Times

Skype, eBay’s Internet phone division, has always been something of a problem child for the e-commerce giant.

The service is growing like a weed, with 309 million registered users. It earned $126 million in the first quarter, exceeding what eBay and PayPal earned at similar age.

Yet considering eBay paid $2.6 billion for Skype in 2005 and last year took a massive write-down on the acquisition, investors and industry observers still view Skype through the thick, dreary lens of disappointment.

Now eBay hopes to give them a new pair of glasses. Tuesday night the company will make available a test of a new version of the program, called Skype 4.0, which it says is the most dramatic redesign of the calling service in its short five-year history.

Josh Silverman, Skype’s president, says it was time to evolve Skype’s user interface. The service started out by offering free audio calls but has gradually added other kinds of communication, like video calls, file-sharing, and text chats. The main purpose of the upgrade, he said, is to bring all those modes together and make it easier to switch between them in a single conversation.

“If I were to sum it all up, that is what 4.0 is about: the next leap forward in integrated communications,” he said.

The full article can be found at: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/a-redesign-at-skype/index.html?th&emc=th

5 Simple Ways to Start Tracking Word of Mouth Traffic

These tips are thanks to Endless Plain by Serengeti Communications:

Word-of-mouth traffic can be some of the best, most qualified visitors to your site. But, how do you actually know if you are getting traffic from word-of-mouth? PPC and SEO efforts are easy to track because you can segment out traffic based on the specific referrers or entry pages (PPC). You have to be a bit creative to find the word-of-mouth traffic.

1. Check out your direct traffic (no referrer)
2. Check out your branded keyword traffic
3. Check out the blogs
4. Check out the blogs and other conversations
5. Ask your customers
See the full article by Joy Brazelle for more detail:
http://endlessplain.com/2008/06/17/5-simple-ways-to-start-tracking-word-of-mouth-traffic/

In car advertising?

Thanks to AdAge for this post.

Why Your Car May Soon Be Driving Digital Advertising

Steve Rubel on Digital Communications
By Steve Rubel
Published: June 02, 2008

If you think there's already enough to distract you in your life, just wait. With Americans spending 100 hours a year commuting, according to the Census Bureau, the internet is coming to your car in a big way -- and not just to the front seat either.

Dashboard navigation systems provide a natural entry point. Year-over-year unit sales of GPS devices grew nearly 500% during the 2007 holiday season, according to NPD.

Several GPS manufacturers such as Tele Atlas, which supplies systems to the automakers, already display the logos of nearby fast-food restaurants' gas stations. However, the screens are quickly getting more useful -- or cluttered, depending on your point of view. Navigon's high-end model, for example, features helpful restaurant reviews and ratings from Zagat.

Soon, devices that can both send and receive data will hit the market. Dash, for example, is integrating Web 2.0 crowdsourcing into its systems, allowing cars to send information back to the company to improve traffic calculations. As mobile broadband becomes more ubiquitous, it's conceivable that these devices will soon talk to your cellphone via Bluetooth and, thus, talk to social networks as well.

With send/receive capabilities and overall bandwidth improving, local contextual advertising, perhaps rich-media-based, is just around the corner. Google already allows users in Europe to send directions from the web to maps on connected dashboards. Microsoft is working in a system through its Sync technology to provide ad-supported, location-based information for which users would normally pay. (Disclosure: Microsoft and Zagat are clients of Edelman, my employer.)

The back seat offers perhaps more immediate promise for TV advertisers in search of new venues. In March Sirius and Chrysler launched an in-car video network called Backseat TV. The subscription service carries kids programming from Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel and Cartoon Network. Kids weaned on the service will surely demand more as the technology gets more sophisticated, perhaps to the chagrin of parents.

And therein lies the rub: Marketers will need to strike a careful balance to protect privacy and to not push into a space that many consider sacrosanct. However, given the size and captive nature of the in-car audience, the digital-advertising potential is becoming very clear.

http://adage.com/article?article_id=127433

The Customer-Centered Innovation Map

[This post is in thanks to Harvard Business Review]

By thoroughly mapping the job a customer is trying to get done, a company can discover opportunities for breakthrough products and services.

by Lance A. Bettencourt and Anthony W. Ulwick

We all know that people “hire” products and services to get a job done. Office workers hire word-processing software to create documents and digital recorders to capture meeting notes. Surgeons hire scalpels to dissect soft tissue and electrocautery devices to control patient bleeding. Janitors hire soap dispensers, paper towels, and cleansing fluid to help remove grime from their hands.

While all this seems obvious, very few companies use the perspective of “getting the job done” to discover opportunities for innovation. In fact, the innovation journey for many companies is little more than hopeful wandering through customer interviews. Such unsystematic inquiry may occasionally turn up interesting tidbits of information, but it rarely uncovers the best ideas or an exhaustive set of opportunities for growth.

We have developed an efficient yet simple system companies can use to find new ways to innovate. Our method, which we call “job mapping,” breaks down the task the customer wants done into a series of discrete process steps. By deconstructing a job from beginning to end, a company gains a complete view of all the points at which a customer might desire more help from a product or service—namely, at each step in the job. With a job map in hand, a company can analyze the biggest drawbacks of the products and services customers currently use. Job mapping also gives companies a comprehensive framework with which to identify the metrics customers themselves use to measure success in executing a task. (For a description of these metrics and a discussion about how to gather and prioritize them, see Anthony W. Ulwick’s “Turn Customer Input into Innovation” in HBR’s January 2002 issue.)

Job mapping differs substantively from process mapping in that the goal is to identify what customers are trying to get done at every step, not what they are doing currently. For example, when an anesthesiologist checks a monitor during a surgical procedure, the action taken is just a means to an end. Detecting a change in patient vital signs is the job the anesthesiologist is trying to get done. By mapping out every step of the job and locating opportunities for innovative solutions, companies can discover new ways to differentiate their offerings.

Anatomy of a Customer Job

Over the past 10 years, we have mapped customer jobs in dozens of product and service categories that span professional and consumer services, durable and consumable goods, chemicals, software, and many other industries. Our work has revealed three fundamental principles about customer jobs.

All jobs are processes.

Every job, from transplanting a heart to cleaning a floor, has a distinct beginning, middle, and end, and comprises a set of process steps along the way. The starting point for identifying innovation opportunities is to map out—from the customer’s perspective—the steps involved in executing a particular job. Once the steps are identified, a company can create value in a number of ways—by improving the execution of specific job steps; eliminating the need for particular inputs or outputs; removing an entire step from the responsibility of the customer; addressing an overlooked step; resequencing the steps; or enabling steps to be completed in new locations or at different times.

When mapping the job of washing clothes, for example, a company would quickly discover that the step of “verifying that stains have been removed” often comes at the end of the job sequence, after the clothes have been removed from the washing machine, dried, folded, and put away—too late to do much of anything about it. If the washing machine itself could detect the presence of any remaining stains before the wash cycle ended—resequence when verification takes place—it could take the necessary actions at a much more convenient point in the job. If the machine could be designed to remove the need for inputs such as stain removers and bleach, that would be even better.

All jobs have a universal structure.

That universal structure, regardless of the customer, has the following process steps: defining what the job requires; identifying and locating needed inputs; preparing the components and the physical environment; confirming that everything is ready; executing the task; monitoring the results and the environment; making modifications; and concluding the job. Because problems can occur at many points in the process, nearly all jobs also require a problem resolution step.

http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?_requestid=22689&ml_subscriber=true&ml_action=get-article&ml_issueid=BR0805&articleID=R0805H&pageNumber=1