Japanese Video Chain Cashes in on Mobile Internet

Matthew Rothenberg writes: "CIO Insight has a case study that describes how Tokyo's Tsutaya video stores are tracking their users' shopping habits in real time via NTT DoCoMo's i-Mode wireless services and devices. 'We're not interested in merely renting videos to people,' Tsutaya founder Muneaki Masuda says. 'We're collecting lifestyle information, and the possibilities of that are, over time, enormous.'"

Comments

At what point...

[banky]

At what point do the marketing types realize there is a growing segment of the population that 1)actively works to avoid having their "lifestyle information" harvested, and 2)rarely- if ever - does things like click on ads, respond to junk mail or spam, or otherwise do anything that this stuff would help?

Re:At what point...

[foobar104]

At what point do the marketing types realize there is a growing segment of the population that 1)actively works to avoid having their "lifestyle information" harvested, and 2)rarely- if ever - does things like click on ads, respond to junk mail or spam, or otherwise do anything that this stuff would help?

Think of it like evolution. Once you get so old that you can no longer reproduce, natural selection doesn't care about you. You're outside the system. The same forces act on you, but your success or failure has no effect whatsoever on your species.

Same thing with advertising. If you don't participate in the see-buy cycle, then you're outside the system. You still get advertised to, but your choices have no effect whatsoever on your market segment.

In other words, as long as there are enough people out there who respond positively or neutrally to this type of thing, then there's a good reason to keep doing it.

Another analogy. People hand out flyers on street corners because, although 90% of the people may ignore the flyers, 10% of the people may respond to them.

On the other hand, if that 90% of the people, instead of ignoring the flyers, punched the flyer-hander-outer in the nose and burned down the flyer-hander-outer's store, you'd see a sharp decline in flyer-hand-outism.

Not as nefarious as it seems at first glance

[spun]

WHAT?!? A company where people can voluntarily sign up for membership is actually using that membership to track what they buy? And then turning around and using that information to target ads to those members? How innovative.

Although the article is more 'gee-whiz-ain't-it-great' than actually informative, it seems like Tsutaya is only tracking purchases at their stores and through their website, not somehow using people's phones to track everything they do and buy.

Does anyone actually believe there are ANY companies that have a club card that AREN'T doing this? It doesn't really sound like they are doing anything revolutionary.