This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Minority Report movie release, a milestone that is noteworthy as some dimensions of the future imagined in the movie are being played out today. One particular scene from the movie stands out for being spot-on; It’s where the protagonist, John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise) walks through a mall trying to figure out what to do next upon learning he’s wanted for murder.
Since the mall’s virtual billboards are able to identify John using retinal scans, they literally call out to him— aware of his stress and the trouble he’s in.
“John Anderton! You could use a Guinness right about now,” one beer advert beckons.
Another billboard features a gal who tries to entice him with an exotic island excursion: “Get away, John Anderton… Forget your troubles…”
Though the movie was placed in the year 2054, we’re 40 years ahead in terms of being able to deliver this kind of hyper-personalization. We already have the technology, and the data, to serve up offers that are tailored to people’s experiences as they are happening.
We now have access to contextual information as never before, including the real-time events that are defining the totality of people’s experiences. Context emerges when we can connect the dots between real-time events and marry them with static data such as past behavior and preferences. Today’s wide adoption of location-aware mobile devices gives us unprecedented knowledge of our customers’ current environment: Where are they? What’s around them? And the context that businesses are able to derive from their data stream— now enriched by mobility— can help us deliver personalized, relevant messages that cut through the noise.
And locational data isn’t the only information we can tap. There is situational data: What is the customer doing? What’s her mood? There’s also connection, or social, data: What’s the network of people this customer is connected to? Don’t forget temporal data: In two days, this customer will turn 40, an all-important milestone. A contextual view is built on all these data types. When businesses can add context to the static data, they can anticipate behavior and act with precision.
Think of a retailer who sees that a customer has traveled outside of sunny California to Washington, which is being hit by unseasonably early winter chills. Why not show her some puffy jackets in bright hues, both of which she seems to favor based on her past purchases, and offer her a 20% discount on cold-weather apparel at the store near her? Or, consider an airline that sees a frequent flier is going to miss his connecting flight due to the aircraft’s mechanical problems and is probably in a bad mood for it, so it automatically rebooks him on a different flight and sends him an SMS with a complimentary drink voucher that’s sure to put a smile on his face. Or if the business rules dictate (if he’s an über frequent flier), maybe the offer is an upgrade to business class.
Today, location-aware mobile devices answers the “where” question, but we’re only scratching the surface of what is possible. We’ll continue to exploit other sensory features and services on smart, connected devices, such as RFID tags and augmented reality to unlock even greater context beyond just someone’s physical coordinates. As Gartner sees it, context-aware technologies can potentially affect $96 billion of annual consumer spending worldwide by 2015 and they “will include major user, technology and business shifts, including the use of model-driven security in fraud detection and prevention, convergence in television, game, Web and mobile advertising, and new styles of application programming.”
As context becomes a key ingredient for forming tailor-made, one-to-one messages, we enter a world in which we only get offers that are relevant to us in that particular moment. It’s a world in which marketers not only know our favorite beer, but also when to pitch us a tall frosty one.
