San Diego Start-up Hopes Retailers, Brands LUV ADs

September 10, 2014 by Dave Haynes

An ad services start-up operating out of the San Diego area has started a new service called LUV ADs, which uses RFID-embedded loyalty cards and readers paired with screens to deliver contextual, customized ad messaging to consumers.

The pitch is that ads can be targeted down to customer profiles, based on loyalty data, and generate a pile of shopper insights.

The company, Internal Positioning Systems Inc from Solana Beach, CA, concedes targeted advertising based on triggers is not entirely new, but suggests this is a new way to go at it.

“The key highlight of this unique digital signage,” says the news release, “is when it senses a customer standing within its vicinity, it provides behavioral targeted advertising directly to the consumer and actively collects data on the consumer.”

The release continues:

Among its many features, LUV Ads Smart Digital Signage captures and links information associated to a particular consumers behavior, such as activity in aisles, hot/cold traffic trends based on demographics and influencing factors affecting their purchase. These valuable consumer insights and business intelligence are analyzed using LUV Ads patent pending cloud based software to review trends, tweak advertisement strategies to specific demographics and improve sales and foot traffic around the store. The objective is to provide actionable insights for businesses to influence sales strategy.

Based on the collected Personalized consumer data, insights are formed and businesses are able to leverage the information in targeting the consumer with the right messages, offers or products, making it a persuasive sale at the very moment consumer decisions are being made. Traditionally, all in-store promotions, signage or advertising materials are generic and attempt to attract consumer attention, but there is no direct data to indicate if it has been successful at pushing sales. In comparison, LUV ADs Smart Digital Signage offers valuable insights and reachability inside any physical location greatly improving sales and effectiveness of advertising and increasing a company’s ROI on advertising budgets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4Y4Kube1GQ

Speaking on this breakthrough product, Chris Contessa, Founder of LUV Advertisements says, “Our innovative patent pending digital signage takes the involvement of technology enabled targeted advertising to the next level. Today’s consumer is pressed for time and looks at technology as an enabler, so by reaching out to consumers in a direct way helps them make quick shopping decisions, resulting in a win-win situation, for both the business owner and the consumer.”

One of the main advantages of LUV Ads is the Intelligent versatility it offers modern digital signage. Chris says, “you control the content of the message being beamed to any individual, anywhere in the world, at any time; and have the ability to change the message with a click of the mouse. That is incredibly powerful marketing.” Consumers, who are often shown physical advertisements that do not pertain to their lives, will now see advertisements that are significant to their lifestyle needs and wishes, pointing them to make a more informed decisions at the point of sale. For the store owner, it is a big leap from displaying large amounts on generic advertising which do not have immediate impact.

Adrian Anon, Vice President of Engineering, feels he could not be more excited about traversing such a boundary in this new digital era. “I cannot wait until I am standing in line, viewing a trailer for a movie that I know I would want to watch.” 

I think the jury remains out and will be for some time about contextually targeted ads via signs. Intel’s AIM Suite tried and completely failed in getting retailers and brands interested in ad serving based on what video analytics served, and the first round of Bluetooth marketing in retail was also largely a bust.

This sort of thing has to compete with everything from BLE Beacons to Dynamic NFC tags on displays that will let consumers decide much more what they are interested in.

We’ll see. The hard reality is that it is pretty tough for most retailers to get enough content together week to week with baseline messaging, never mind hyper-targeted. Media planners working with brands have this bottomless scroll of media options to select from, so something that introduces MORE complication – no matter the value proposition – is not generally something they want to get into. No time.