Can a network that consists of tens of billions of connected devices – which try to engage with billions of consumers – ever be personalized?
Here at Idomoo, where we create personalized videos, our team was determined to learn the answer. As part of our quest, we partnered with leading brands (Cadbury and Johnny Walker), ad agencies (Saatchi and Ogilvy), and IoT tech platforms (Evrythng.com) to find out.
Our aim was to create an intersection between the IoT and video narratives, by essentially connecting stories to personalized data. To achieve this, we traveled back a decade or two, and examined how personalization once thrived in the context of gift giving.
Gift- giving of the Past
Before the advent of online shopping, if you wanted to buy a box of chocolates or bottle of aged whiskey for a friend, you’d likely walk into an actual shop, purchase the gift, and attach a nice handwritten note.
Today – particularly, if that friend lives thousands of miles away, you can buy these same gifts online, and choose from hundreds of options and special offers.
A few clicks are all it takes to purchase the gift, and have it delivered to your friend by FedEx within 24 hours. Online retailers spend millions on digital advertising, branding and social campaigns to stand out from the crowd and capture your attention while shopping online.
Is Technology Killing Brand Loyalty?
This is just one example of how technology has created unimaginable economies of scale and reach at the expense of customer engagement and brand loyalty. Unlike the past, relationships between brands and consumers today exist through a screen, and gifts once considered personal are reduced to transactions.
Technology was designed to enhance user experience, increase engagement, and better connect people to relevant products and services – so where did it go wrong?
Bringing back Customer Engagement and Loyalty Through Technology
Idomoo’s goal was to bring personalization back to gift giving by connecting people with meaningful touch points. We worked with the teams at Cadbury and Johnny Walker to create personalized, real-time, gifting videos for consumers worldwide – a result of creative thinking and innovative technology.
Our first campaign was with Cadbury in India, South Asia, and Australia, for which we partnered with Ogilvy and Saatchi. Once consumers clicked via Facebook Connect, Idomoo Social used photographs and data from their profiles to build personalized videos – connected to chocolate boxes!
For the Johnny Walker campaign, we cooperated with Evrythng, an award-winning IoT cloud platform that connects any consumer product to the web. The combination of Evrythng’s IoT platform and Idomoo spawned thousands of personalized gifting videos between family members in Vietnam, who wanted to give each other a bottle of Jonny Walker.
The Potential of Personalized Video for Brand Engagement
The truth is, combining IoT and personalized video has so much potential that it’s almost impossible to grasp. In both campaigns, we strengthened the relationship between consumers and leading CPG brands, which ultimately enhanced brand value and the digital connection that exits between the two.
In the future, each unique product – from shampoo to a smartphone, will have its own digital identity. Attributes such as location, features, or connection to a consumer can be used to develop branded and personalized videos as in the examples above.
The potential that lies in this combination is exponentially larger than the current version of one-to-many or brand-to-consumer marketing scopes. Scalable and open cloud based solutions such as Idomoo’s personalized video engagement platform have the opportunity to support such initiatives.
