Unilever And GSK use of NFC: key potential pay-offs for enabled-stakeholders

Starting with 325 six-sheet digital poster sites in Reading, the key potential lies in the simplicity and scalability of NFC.

With over 130,000 poster sites in the UK, each offering an incremental route-to-consumer as each poster site becomes a new retail outlet, with advertisers gaining access to additional consumers data (name of NFC-enabled users, location, and shopping history) at ‘point-of-purchase’.
Advertising gains  

For advertisers, the combination of the low ‘chipping-cost’ of each poster with the ability to offer instant gratification gives a whole new meaning to impulse purchasing.

Moreover, the user-feedback data can be used to build ‘super-local’ highly accountable promotional campaigns using media-rich, high quality content that can only serve to drive store-level assortment for those retailers (and their suppliers) that want to stay in the game.

(For those unwilling to wait, yet needing some relative response details, some recent US data on the combined use of Bluetooth, WiFi, QR Codes and NFC to promote hotel room booking may help).

All told, it would appear that this new potential will only be limited by the availability of NFC-enabled phones and a possible privacy backlash if not handled carefully..
Raising the competition bar

For traditional retailers and brand owners providing only a token response to the savvy consumer’s need for individual attention via localised offerings, there is a real danger that their NFC early-adopter competitors may take NFC as the new ‘normal’, while traditional players insist on using up those bulk-buy mountains of  old posters and leaflets that seemed such a bargain only yesterday…