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AT&T, Verizon offer daily deals with a phone-tracking twist

Kevin Fitchard — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 20:40:15 +0000

AT&T and Verizon Wireless already know where you are – that’s the price of being connected to a mobile network – but now they want to use that information to offer you coupons and daily deals. Verizon is going several steps further, taking the demographic info stored in its customer databases, your web browsing habits and even the apps you use to create hyper-tailored deals.

Both operators coincidentally launched location-based marketing services today, respectively called Verizon Selects and AT&T Alerts. Verizon’s program is just a pilot, targeting a portion of its customer base, but both operators stressed their programs are opt-in only and neither would sell nor distribute any personally identifiable information to outside companies.

That may assuage many customers who want their privacy protected. But these programs — particularly Verizon’s since it tracks the way consumers use their mobile phones — will give many customers the creeps. Last year a huge controversy broke out about over U.S. carriers’ use of Carrier IQ, a company that anonymously, but secretly, gathered phone usage information from handsets. Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile and even Apple claimed to use the info only for diagnostic purposes, but the resulting backlash forced most carriers to excise the software from their handsets.

Verizon was the only major carrier whose hands were clean of the Carrier IQ scandal, but ironically the information Verizon Selects is using to target offers is the exact type of data that Carrier IQ collected. This time, however, Verizon and AT&T are asking permission, which may just be the critical difference in the eyes of the consumer.

The Yankee Group conducted a survey in the wake of the carrier IQ controversy, finding that a majority of U.S. mobile subscribers wouldn’t mind if their carriers logged information from their phones, but only if they were transparent about doing so and if that tracking provided some legitimate value such as being used to more quickly fix problems with their phones.

That seems to be the bet that AT&T and Verizon are taking now. Customers who inherently mistrust their operators may never sign up for these programs, but many might see value in them.

AT&T Alerts is available to all of its customers, and is designed to be both location and time sensitive. If you’re approaching a Gap, for example, AT&T ships you text message out of the blue with a link to a coupon for jeans. You can register for the service on the Alerts web page or opt in by texting “join” to the “ATTALERTS” short code, though it’s not available yet for the iPhone 5.

Verizon Selects is a lot more expansive, covering much more media than SMS – even direct snail mail — and unlike AT&T Alerts, it provides a direct link between the third-party advertiser and the customer. Here’s how Verizon explains it in its News Center blog:

Simply put, Verizon Selects will use location, web browsing and mobile application usage data, as well as other information including customer demographic and interest data, to create specific insights. Verizon Selects analyzes this information about customers to see whether they fit into certain audiences Verizon or third party marketers are trying to reach. Depending on the results, participating customers will receive marketing messages or offers that may be of more interest to them than what they see or receive today. These messages could be delivered in various ways such as email, text, postal mail or online or mobile advertising.

We are asking customers to opt-in to Verizon Selects because of the types of information being used and because the capabilities provided to third-party marketers gives them the ability to reach customers directly. It’s important to remember that Verizon DOES NOT share information that identifies customers personally outside of Verizon.

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Urban Airship starts filling Apple’s digital wallet with Tello buy

Kevin Fitchard — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 14:00:06 +0000

In-app message pusher Urban Airship has acquired Tello (see disclosure below), a specialist in digital wallet cards for Apple’s new Passbook platform. As with its purchase of SimpleGeo last year, Airship plans to use its platform to expand its appeal to marketers and consumer brands beyond mobile app messaging.

Tello started out by developing customer feedback apps for retail businesses, but with the emergence of iOS 6 it changed its focus to Apple’s new digital wallet. It has developed a platform called PassTools, which allows for the easy creation of passes, loyalty cards, tickets and coupons that slide digitally into the iPhone or iPad.

While American Airlines and Walgreens may have the resources to churn out digital boarding passes and loyalty cards, your typical gym or local pizza chain doesn’t, explained Joe Beninato, Tello’s co-founder and until recently its CEO. “We came to the realization that it was very difficult for people who weren’t engineers to build these passes,” Beninato said.

PassTools is capable of generating the tens of thousands of individual boarding passes a day required by an airline or a monthly coupon for a pizzeria, which is why Airship found the technology so appealing, said Urban Airship CMO Brent Hieggelke. Airship can sell passes to the current roster of big brands using its app-based push messaging services, and it can target smaller companies who otherwise have no presence in an app store or even on the mobile web. For a small local business, a loyalty card or coupon may be the only digital presence it needs, Hieggelke said.

The companies, which were brought together by their common investor True Ventures, wouldn’t reveal and financial details of the deal. Urban Airship will keep Tello’s staff of five full-time employees on board in Palo Alto (Airship is based in Portand, Ore.). Before the acquisition, Tello had raised $2.7 million in a Series A round led by Bullpen Capital and True.

Disclosure: Urban Airship and Tello are both backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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GroceryServer, ZipList put the web to work clipping coupons

Kevin Fitchard — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 15:39:08 +0000

The internet has revolutionized many of our mundane tasks, but there’s one chore that the dual wizards — the web and the mobile phone — haven’t yet conquered: clipping grocery coupons. Millions of people cut coupons from store circulars and newspapers, even print them out from email, but so far it’s been awfully difficult to digitize those 25-percent-off and buy-one-get-one-free promotions into a mobile app.

While there are innumerable coupon apps in the market, they’re primarily designed to access the world of online promotional offers. There’s still a wealth of small-bore grocery coupons and deals offered by national food brands and local grocery stores alike that never make onto a website or into a daily deal app. They’re trapped in the merchandizing software that the grocery stores use to manage their inventory and sales.

But Seattle-based startup GroceryServer.com claims to have tapped into those systems, translating their proprietary grocery data into a language a web or mobile app can understand. CEO and co-founder Corbin de Rubertis said GroceryServer is now putting that data to work to create a hyperlocal digital marketing platform for grocers.

ZipList, a recipe aggregator and grocery app maker owned by Condé Nast, is integrating GroceryServer’s data into its shopping list app. Using ZipList’s web interface, accessible from its own site as well as through 200 partner recipe sites, you can search for coupons and grocery offers by food category, brand, zip code and even specific stores. If you’re looking at a specific recipe saved from one of ZipList’s partner food sites, the engine will tell you if there are any national or local deals for the ingredients in that recipe.

ZipList CEO Geoff Allen said that ZipList would soon give its couponing engine the smarts to reverse the meal-planning process. Instead of matching deals against your menu, ZipList will be able to generate menus based on deals available in your area or specifically in the stores you shop in. For instance if there’s a stellar discount on ground sirloin at the local Safeway, ZipList will scour your saved recipe library for dishes that utilize ground beef. “We have a goal of localizing every recipe on the Web,” Allen said.

Bridging the broader world of food — from restaurant menus, recipe ingredient lists and nutritional data as well as mac-n’-cheese coupons – with the web is a huge problem that we have explored in depth at GigaOM. Food and nutritional data come from multiple sources and they’re used by multiple end-points and applications, not all of them friendly to outside sources of data. One of those sources is the cash register, which presented a tricky problem to Grocery Server and ZipList.

Delivering individual digitized coupons with their own bar codes is counterproductive if you’ve got a stack of offers you’re trying to take advantage of. GroceryServer and ZipList have tried to solve the problem by uploading coupon data to customers’ loyalty cards – when you scan in your Safeway or Kroger card, the discounts are automatically applied to your bill. For customers who don’t have loyalty cards (or stores that don’t offer them), ZipList allows you to print out a scan form, which can be handed the cashier.

How local is local?

GroceryServer is capable of parsing the databases of big national grocery chains and food distributors like Kraft, but a good deal of the potential savings on groceries is available at the local level. We’re not just talking the corner market or the independent butcher shop. Individual outlets of the national chains run their own sales based on what they have in inventory, and except in rare cases, those offers aren’t entered into the national merchandizing databases, GroceryServer’s de Rubertis said.

GroceryServer has tried to tackle both issues by creating a multi-tiered marketing system, which not only tracks nationwide promotions automatically but also allows grocery managers to manually enter local limited-time sales into its system. If a store has an abundance of halibut – whether it’s the independent fishmonger or the seafood counter at Whole Foods – a manager could create a promotional offer in GroceryServer’s system and have it appear right next to the coupons for Coca Cola and Velveeta in ZipList’s grocery list app.

Such a system can help revolutionize the concept of local grocery marketing, de Rubertis said. Instead of relying on circulars that have to be designed, printed and distributed days, if not weeks, in advance, stores can react immediately to their changing inventories. Rather than focus on processed or packaged foods, as most couponing campaigns do, deals move to the perishable-good fringes of the market where expiration dates and shelf life require much more nimble merchandizing. And instead of making coupon clipping the realm of the big box grocery stores, GroceryServer’s hyperlocal platform can scale all the way down to the local fruit stand and farmers’ market.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock user Chris Howey.

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SnipSnap scans and displays printed coupons with mobile app

Ryan Kim — Tue, 22 May 2012 20:08:38 +0000

Despite the growth of mobile coupons, the vast majority of them are still printed. And that’s where the biggest offers are. So instead of trying to displace coupons completely, SnipSnap a new Philadephia start-up is giving people a way to take a picture of a printed coupon with an iPhone app and display it a check-out.

The app, which launched last month, allows people to scan coupons they find in a mailer or newspaper. It reformats the information in the app and makes it easy for people to present the barcode at the point of sale for redemption. Users can get set alerts to warn them before a coupon is about to expire or remind them when they enter a store where they’ve saved a coupon. The app also offers the ability to share coupons online through Facebook, Twitter and email.

For users who don’t have coupons to scan, they can also discover other coupons snipped by fellow users. And retailers, including SnipSnaps’s first partner, Aeropostale, can also serve up coupons inside the app’s discover tab.

Not every coupon can be redeemed successfully, either because the point of sale hardware can’t scan the barcode or because the store may not choose to accept it in this form. SnipSnap doesn’t work with manufacturer coupons right now, but the company is working to accept those offer coupons inside the app. SnipSnap lets users report if a coupon was accepted or not, which goes into a success score rating.

Ted Mann, the founder and CEO, came up with the idea after leaving newspaper giant Gannett, where he served as digital development director. He said he was motivated by what he called his “bowl of shame” of clipped coupons that eventually expired. Eventually, the app will become a way to distribute mobile coupons, but for the present it lets people make use of the 93 percent of coupons that are printed today.

Mann’s app, which won a couple of start-up contests in Philadelphia, has seen more than 123,000 downloads and has been featured in the Apple App Store. The former DreamIt’s company announced Tuesday it has raised a $555,000 seed round.

There are still questions about how well the service can work. Retailers may rethink how generous they are with coupons if they know that can be so easily shared. And the fact that a merchant can still reject a coupon means a consumer doesn’t have that certainty that a print coupon user has. That can be a problem if retailers start pushing back on the use of the app. But if SnipSnap can work with more retailers and eventually manufacturers, it can become a viable competitor to Coupons.com and Cellfire.

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AmEx builds a mobile home for its social offers

Ryan Kim — Mon, 14 May 2012 19:57:54 +0000

Updated: American Express has been pushing the edge of next-generation offers, using Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter to offer coupons that can be synced to a user’s card account. But up until now, there wasn’t one place to find and organize all those offers. On Monday, the credit card company plans to introduce a new My Offers tab in its American Express iPhone app, which will give people one place to view all the available offers and recommendations on which ones they might like.

My Offers, which builds off American Express’s Smart Offer technology, is being tested first in New York and Los Angeles, where users will see a collection of both national and local offers. Those users will be able to fire up their American Express app and see a stream of offers that have been chosen for them based on their spending habits. They will be able to sync offers to their card from the app and can see a list of saved offers, which can be sorted by location or expiration date. After they’ve used an offer, My Offers will record how much they’ve saved and where the offers were used. Card holders will need to wait a couple of hours before the updated app will become available at 6 p.m. ET Monday.

The upgrade isn’t just for consumers. Small merchants will now have the ability to target all three social channels using an enhanced version of the Go Social offer entry tool. Previously, American Express pushed merchants to support one channel or another. Now, they can hit Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter and My Offers with one offer, or they can choose where they want their coupons to appear. Also, with the personalized offers, merchants can also have a better hope of hitting the right consumers with their coupons. This could be another challenge for other offer providers such as Groupon, which is pinning some of its future on mobile offers through Groupon Now. American Express does not charge small merchants to list their offers but takes a cut of the revenues from larger retailers, based on how much money is brought in through the offers.

As I’ve written before, I think American Express is well positioned to be a big player in the local offers market. It’s got an elegant way to close the loop on redemptions by letting people save ads to their card account. Merchants can be assured they know how an offer actually performed. AmEx also has a lot of resources and experience in the loyalty and offers business. And with its rich transaction history, it can help target offers in a way that many other offer providers can’t.

But I still have a problem with My Offers as it stands, something I’ve brought up to American Express a couple times already. There’s still no way for a user to have one place to view all their saved offers they’ve attached from the different social platforms. You basically have to remember where you saved an offer and go back to that app to see it. That’s not a great experience and it means that you can lose track of an offer and forget when it expires. Discovering and saving offers through My Offers is a good step and may solve the problem for some people, who will have a one-stop shop. But for many card holders who hear about an offer via their social network, there still needs to be a way to put all those offers in one place. UPDATE: I’m told that My Offers actually does aggregate newly synced offers from Facebook and Twitter. But it doesn’t handle older offers that were previously saved from the various social channels. This is still a really good improvement and basically what I’ve been asking for.

Luke Gebb, vice president of global network marketing, told me in an interview that a future version of My Offers will aggregate saved offers from all the different social channels and will include push notifications for offers that are close to expiring. He said American Express has a number of other companies that are looking to connect to its Smart Offer technology, so the need for a consolidated offer wallet will be even more pronounced soon. After the initial roll out with the iPhone, American Express is looking to expand its My Offers feature to its apps on other mobile platforms.

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Foursquare looks to personalized offers to generate revenue

Ryan Kim — Wed, 09 May 2012 04:34:48 +0000

Foursquare plans to distribute personalized offers through a redesigned app in July, part of a larger effort to start making money through the location-based social network. The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Foursquare will allow merchants to pay for special placement of personalized local offers.

Foursquare already offers specials for users, but it hasn’t charged merchants for special billing of those coupons. Soon, when users discover new places and businesses in Foursquare’s Explore feature, merchants will get a chance to highlight their offers for users.

This could go a long way toward answering Foursquare’s big question: how will it raise money? It announced last week it would charge merchants $10 to instantly verify their business instead of doing it through the mail. That’s probably not a big money maker in the grand scheme of things. But combined with the coupons, it shows how Foursquare is looking to make money. It’s trying to get to the point where merchants who are using Foursquare’s free tools will be ready to start paying for them.

Foursquare CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley said the company is working both on building out the product and generating revenue from it. Ultimately, he said, the best way to make money is to continue to get better at connecting people with places. It’s not just about helping consumers find places, but it’s also about helping merchants find their customers, he said.

“Instead of serving up places we think you might be interested in, we can do the same things for businesses, and [tell them] these are the folks that are most likely to come here, based upon their check-in habits, based upon the places they’ve been to and their friends have been,” Crowley told the Wall Street Journal.

Foursquare will have plenty of competition, from Groupon, Yelp and others who trying to help local businesses attract and retain customers. But the company has 20 million users, who continue to use the app not just to check-in but increasingly as a guide for local discovery. That’s still a great foundation to build a profitable business. Foursquare has to just figure out how to make it happen.

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Amex is all potential in social commerce

David Card — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 14:00:43 +0000

After attracting attention last summer for social commerce initiatives with Foursquare and Facebook, last week American Express announced a new coupons hook-up with Twitter. Amex has the potential to be a powerhouse in social commerce, but so far that potential remains unrealized.

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AmEx lets Twitter users turn tweets into coupons

Ryan Kim — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 05:14:12 +0000

American Express is partnering with Twitter and letting its members link a merchant coupon to their card by tweeting out a hashtag from a retailer. The service is similar to one that American Express has with Facebook, letting consumers use their favorite social network to take advantage of special offers.

The way it works is that consumers who sync their credit card to their Twitter account will be able to tie offers from merchants to their card by including a specific hashtag in a tweet. When they go to redeem their offer with a purchase using their synced card, the discount will be applied to their card and reflected in their account within a few days, according to American Express. Users don’t have to actually clip a coupon or print anything out to take advantage of the service. They just have to send a tweet and the discount is stored for them.

American Express has created a new Twitter handle (@amexsync) that will confirm an enrollment in an offer or will notify users if an offer has expired. It will also direct people to the official @americanexpress Twitter account to see new favorited offers. There’s a whole host of merchants who will be participating in the program including Best Buy, H&M, McDonald’s, Whole Foods, TicktetMaster and others.

Linking a Twitter coupon to a card can present some complications over other digital coupons. Even though a person might have linked a coupon to their card, their only confirmation is an @reply message from American Express. If that tweet gets hard to find in a user’s interactions list or they don’t remember to favorite that tweet, they might not remember the exact terms of the offer. That might be a problem if it’s not easy for people to know that they can take advantage of a deal when they go to make a purchase with their card.

But I think linking offers to credit cards is gaining steam and shows that even with the push toward mobile payments, there’s simple ways to attach coupons to the credit cards people are already using. And it shows that Twitter can be leveraged for more social commerce.

Here’s a video that explains how it all works:

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Opportunities and challenges for mobile deals

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 07:55:17 +0000

The trend “mobile deals” combines location-aware discounts with mobile marketing campaigns and often incorporates purchases made on the phone at brick-and-mortar retailers. This report sizes up the mobile deals space with an aim to present a comprehensive view of the influential companies and technologies. Heavyweights like Google, PayPal and American Express are moving aggressively forward with new offerings, and it will be worth watching their different strategies (e.g., deploying QR codes vs. NFC technology) to see which dominates and sets the overall bar for the market.

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Forecast: the future of near field communication

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:46:32 +0000

By 2015, the worldwide sales of NFC-equipped handsets will reach 263.6 million units, with the cumulative total at more than half a billion compatible devices. This report covers the current landscape for NFC, examines the technology’s different forms of deployment and forecasts its future. It also examines the various deployments of NFC technology — mobile payments, point of purchase, augmented reality — and the challenges businesses, carriers and handset makers face moving forward. Companies mentioned in this report include Google, TapIt, Amazon and NTT DoCoMo. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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