New see-through digital display technology will begin tempting supermarket shoppers with advertising and in-store directions embedded on freezer and cooler doors later this summer.
Created by Dayton, Ohio-based digital signage manufacturer Stratacache, PrimaSee will launch in 5,000 to 6,000 retail stores across North America on July 1 with the backing of five major brands. Retailers and marketers will be able to preview the high-definition displays in advance of the official launch at the EuroShop trade fair in Dusseldorf, Germany later this week.
The tech, under development for the past nine months, is designed to seamlessly integrate dynamic, point-of-purchase messages and in-store directions in an unobtrusive way.
‘There’s no good way to communicate digitally with customers [in those types of environments],’ Stratacache CEO Chris Riegel tells MiC. ‘You can have a TV on a mount coming down, but it’s obstructive. You want digital media to look like it was designed into that environment.’
Riegel would not name the brands supporting the launch, but said they include two leading beer brands, one leading frozen food brand and two major soft drinks. The cost to install PrimaSee will depend on the fixture, but he says a ballpark figure is $5,000 to $7,000.
The displays will run on Stratacache’s proprietary Activa For Media software and allow a retailer or brand to cross-promote items in other sections of the store, offer coupons, social media interactions, QR codes and wayfinding directions to products located on the shelves behind glass doors. In the third quarter of 2011, Stratacache will update the software with touch-screen, gestural-based interfaces and 3D features.
Marketers will be able to manually change the display messages by logging in to Stratacache’s core management service, which then distributes the updates via a wireless network.
‘From a brand perspective, the challenge is always ‘How do I get messages across to a large portion of the population quickly?” says Riegel. ‘We see the potential for hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of the devices to roll out in the next 24 months.’
