Smartphone opportunities to engage city dwellers

Starcom MediaVest’s Steve Smith looks at how brand owners can engage with smartphone users outside of the home – with particular focus on the differences between city and rural life – and the impact that new image recognition technology is having on the advertising industry.

City life is often characterised by anonymity. For some city dwellers, this can be positive. Move to the city, create your own identity, befriend who you want. On the other hand, anonymity can have negative impacts. Nearly two thirds of people (62%) do not know most of their neighbours. This increases to 73% of 25-34 year olds. And in the case of any trouble, only 38% report they can call on someone on their street to help them. This is even lower for 25-34 year olds, with only a quarter saying they could do this (ICM Research).

Crowded urban environments also make private spaces smaller and more difficult to find. In one survey, the number one feature people wanted improved in their homes was the amount of storage space (Homes and Communities Agency).

It is not surprising therefore, that people who live in and travel through city spaces often experience stress and tension due to the close and dense proximity to strangers.

Full time workers – “I’m feeling more stressed these days” (Any Agree). Source: Touchpoints 2012

One consequence of the anonymity and stress that many people experience as they move through city spaces is the use of smartphones to create temporary mobile ‘private spaces’. These include mobile gaming, social networking, playing music and watching mobile video, as the chart, below, shows.

Mobile social networking is especially important for highlighting how people use new technology to connect with people beyond where they live. Whilst urban dwellers are less likely to know their neighbours, they are often more connected than town and village dwellers. This is especially the case for 18-24 year olds. Whilst 28% urban dwellers in this age group regularly communicate with 15 people or more, only 22% of town dwellers of the same age do this (Touchpoints 2012).

Smartphone owners – Activities on smartphones at least a few times a week. Source: Touchpoints 2012

Some smartphone activities clearly provide opportunities for brand owners to reconnect people with the spaces around them. This includes advertising and in-store shopping. The following chart shows that shopping is an important activity among city dwellers at the weekend – slightly more so than for town dwellers. Another interesting difference between them is that whilst shopping is more popular among town dwellers in the morning, the flipside is true the afternoon.

Shopping at weekends: Inner London vs Town dwellers. Touchpoints 2012

Two emerging ways I want to highlight that brand owners are able to engage people via their smartphones in order to augment their shopping experiences are Aurasma and Google Goggles.

Aurasma

Aurasma’s image recognition technology uses a smartphone’s camera to recognize real world images and then overlay rich media on top of them in the form of animations, videos and 3D models. These can be on in-store or on-street posters, or in the press.

Brands that have used Aurasma include O2, Tesco, Kellogg’s, The Gap and Universal, in the Times and Sun newspapers. Some of these have created their own apps that use the Aurasma technology. For example, Tesco has created an app called ‘Tesco Discover Us’.

Google Goggles

Google Goggles is a downloadable image recognition application used for searches based on pictures taken by smartphones. For example, taking a picture of an object or its barcode in-store would search for information about it.

The example below is a photo taken of a Relentless Energy drink can, which then leads to Google search results about it.