Coke bottles – Ohmigod! – floating in mid-air!!!
September 28, 2011 by Dave Haynes
For some reason, I go into some rapid eye-blinking state when I read and re-read the key pitch line for this new company:
9D Media is the world’s first “Glasses-Free” 3D Digital Out of Home Signage Network, purely focused on reaching the Hispanic consumer.
There’s a network now that JUST does autostereoscopic 3D? And it only targets Hispanic people???
Apparently yes, and they have a pair of 46-inch 3D screens up in 36 El Super grocery stores in California, Nevada and Arizona.
Next time you enter El Super (http://www.ElSuperMarkets.com) to do your grocery shopping, you might see a Coca-Cola bottle floating towards you. Beginning on September 21st, 2011 shoppers at one of the nation’s leading and fastest growing independent Hispanic grocery store chains, owned by Bodega Latina Corporation, will experience 3D advertising at its best.
The Coca-Cola Hispanic 3D Ad Network is the world’s first “glasses free” 3D digital out of home signage network purely targeting Hispanics. People will see ads floating as far as 2 feet away from the screen allowing consumers to have a much closer experience with various products.
Glasses-free 3D is very big on the novelty factor, but there are lots of doubts about its sustainability as a medium. It’s interesting at first, but nowhere near as spellbinding as it is often made out to be. In the end it boils down to quality content and creative. The bottles of soda hovering (Oh my God, my mind is being repeatedly blown) in mid-air thing gets old really quickly.
However, there are two important things to note here:
1 – 9D Media, the company behind this, has in-house animators. So they have creative capability and experience, and can control what can be very high production costs for 3D;
2 – They have major brands like Coca-Cola and Nestle participating, which gives this more credibility. Three-dozen stores is nowhere near enough scale to get real attention from global brands, but the association is valuable even if the brand managers are paying little or nothing for the spots.
I don’t have a lot of enthusiasm for 3D in Digital OOH, but this is admittedly interesting. The far less attention-getting note that the network is focused on Hispanic consumers is actually as interesting to me, because there is some clear, helpful focus to the audience being touted.
Let’s see how it plays out.
Seems kinda contradictory to me. They should just stick to in-house and be upfront about there motives. Lol
Fascinated to know how they are monetizing this type of display. I agree with your points about the wow factor fizzling after a short while. I gotta ask the same old boring bottom line question: “How does it make money?” For the store? For the brand? For the provider? Hmmm.