The Power of Touch

AdMedia
05 April 2003

By David McNickel


Picture the scene. You've just landed at Hong Kong airport and you need to find a hotel. the walls of the baggage claim area are adorned with large bright back-lit advertisements for a half dozen hotels. You cross the room and touch the Sheraton ad. It comes to life. Are there rooms available? A gym? How much in $NZ? Touch the glass and the ad answers your questions - you even type in your details and book a room. For Al Munro of NextWindow, advertising doesn't get any more direct than this. "Our specialty is the design and development of touch technologies," he says, "which gives advertisers the ability to take things another step from just a passive display of information."

Munro's company was last year on the receiving end of a $NZ500,000 Technology NZ grant to assist him in taking NextWindow's offering to the world. The business is just the type of operation the Government is counting on to lift NZ's technology sector out of the doldrums - smart and unique with just the right business model behind it.

So what do they do? In simple terms NextWindow can 'touch-enable' glass surfaces. And although technology similar to this has been around for years, the NextWindown method involves small optical sensors (the current ones are already tiny, but Munro says the bulk of the Technology NZ grant will be spent on further miniaturisation) that can pinpoint exactly where a finger is touching glass. The upshot is that almost any size window or screen can be touch-enabled - a much different offering than the touch-enabled computer screens most readers are familiar with.

Munro says for marketers, the possible scenarios where consumers could interact directly with advertising are almost limitless. "Let's say I'm at a closed car yard," he says, "and there's a BMW ad in the window. It's a push technology but if I'm only interested in the 5 series or the safety aspects, why can't I go and touch that and look at the things that are of interest to me"

"That's what I see the touch technology as giving marketers the capacity to do. To tailor
that message to the individual, which is what direct-marketing is all about - that ability to tailor a communication."

Alert readers may have already seen a NextWindow - enabled screen in action, says Munro, as one was erected near the America's Cup Village tourism centre. "They were getting about 1,000 questions a day, like: What's the weather forecast? Where are the toilets? Who is racing today? The touch screen was able to handle a lot of those questions."

What does it cost? Munro says the actual cost of the hardware and software to enable a real estate agent's window for example (for property searches, mortgage calculators and the like) would be a modest $6,000, but he says the greatest cost in the process is more likely to be the content. "This is a good idea," he says, "but it's only as good as the interactivity that you create behind it."