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

Bad movies

[Capt. DrunkenBum]

I guess I won't rent that copy of "Dude, Wheres my car."

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.

Re:At what point...

[sabinm]

Unfortunately, were applying western thought to a very eatern culture. Japanese do not have the same feeling of privacy. Loudspeakers in public places "encourage" people to go to bed in some areas of Japan. The "annihilation of self" or the sacrifice of self for the good of the group is a prevalent ideology in Japan and other eastern cultures and I'm assuming that they would not be too put out by having their information transmitted to a potential supplier of wares, goods, or serivces.

Re:At what point...

[Bodrius]

At what point will people realize that lifestyles are not globalized by any means yet, and that part of the difference is the level of willingness to share that kind of information.

I'm not surprised this would work in Japan. Japan is "consumerism 'done right'", where 'done right' means there are no compromises. We're talking about a culture that has underwear vending machines, corporations live in a comfortable mercantilist marriage with the government, and the idea of opposing a keiretsu makes as much sense as voluntary amputation.

This doesn't mean it can work in the US, or many other places.

The fact that it may not work here doesn't mean it won't work there, either. Not every culture puts that much value in "privacy", not even the US's, and you require a very significant demographic actively opposing this, or your privacy advocates will end up being tomorrows "sovereign citizen"'s movement.

Re:At what point...

[raian]

The "annihilation of self" or the sacrifice of self for the good of the group is a prevalent ideology in Japan and other eastern cultures and I'm assuming that they would not be too put out by having their information transmitted to a potential supplier of wares, goods, or serivces.

I'm sure that sounded great when you read it in your Japanese cultural theory class, but I can tell you for a fact that it is not true.

Japan actually has much stronger laws than the US regarding what kinds of information companies can collect, and what they can do with that information. "Privacy" is quite important to most modern Japanese, and the fact that it is difficult to obtain just makes it more precious.

There is already a huge problem with keitai (cell phone) spam on i-mode and other services in Japan. My girlfriend recently had to change her number due to 50+ spam calls a day. These kinds of problems have made Japanese consumers very aware of the dangers of leaving personal information unguarded.

Tsutaya is not doing anything that hundreds of US companies aren't slavering to do. And you can bet that once wireless penetration in the US reaches the levels of Japan, Americans will be tracked in far more insidious ways than this. In fact, I would say that Americans, rather than Japanese, are the ones who would happily "annihilate themselves" for convenience, as their use of credit cards (which most Japanese mistrust) for even the smallest transactions shows.

Re:At what point...

[phunhippy]

You Say: 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.

I say: Does this mean we can and should beat the living shit out of jehova's witnesses and other god loving preacher type monstrosities that come my home door? sounds like a great idea to me!

Now that sales are tracked...

[gpinzone]

...will this mean less sales of bukake films or more?

Re:Like Doubleclick

[Jeremi]

No kidding. If a person does it, it's "stalking" and you can get a restraining order. If a company does it, its "market research" and perfectly legal.

(Yes, I know, you don't have to do business with a company that does this sort of thing. But that presumes that (a) you know that the company is spying on you, and (b) that there exist reasonable alternatives)

Evisceration

[anonicon]

Either Japan has a wildly different culture that has no expectation to legal, personal or consumer privacy, or this company is going to be eviscerated for tracking its customers' behavioral habits (not just purchasing habits).

Then again, I wonder what the safeguards are. If people are opting in to receive this wireless info, no big deal - they chose to receive it. Tracking's a different story, but still, what web site owner doesn't track how much demand they get from an ad or a news story? If they're not opting in, hmmm - sounds spammish.

Last, I wonder if Tsutaya is tracking consumer response to their e-notifications en masse, like matching up web site visitors to their country of origin, or if they're doing microtracking - matching up responses to each individual, each indiv with their own corporate-database-tracked profile? One's OK, the other's nuts. Both are easily and totally possible.

Can't wait til Blockbuster or BestBuy starts doing this! Not...

What I hate about this

[mrroot]

Corporations always think they can track what I buy and then use something like the "recommendation engine" they talk about in the article to tell me what else I would like. Sure that seems like a helpful service but it really is a very selfish service, because it does nothing to expose me to new and interesting stuff, it simply herds me along with what 9 out of 10 other people watched after they watched what I just watched. The whole purpose is to get the most of my money the fastest way possible.

OK, so you might say, "you dont have to use the recommendation service". But you see that is not the problem. The problem is that they will eventually produce a much less diverse range of films, music, etc and focus in only on what the majority wants to see. They are already doing that today, but it will get worse with systems like these. Soon your local Blockbuster will not bother stocking your favorite cult film, if they haven't already. My problem with this is that it really homogenizes the population into a bunch of boring drones who are told what to like and what to think.

I love this...we do it here why not there

[CDWert]

We do similar things here, cable companies selling logs to the same people that administer the systems of grocery cards to know if someone was watching a commercial for a product bought by you.

I wonder what sort of psycological impact this has on a person.

Really, people talk about the internet polarization of ideologies, what is this doing to say someone that may have a passing interest in say quiltmaking they rent a video, the japaneese system shove quiltmaking products of all sorts down the customers throat at every juncture, and eventually through the aid of all including the ISP, Cable Companies, etc, all the person see is quiltmaking shit, do they , A) go insane B) Join the Rosie Grier(for you who dont know look it up its worth the laugh) needlepint society. c)Gain a hatred for quilts, buy ginsu knives and start chopping up quilts, which then leads to a proliferation of cutlery advertising targeted at this same customer, who in turn becomes a serial killer due to all the cutlery advertising now.

Leave your TV on some stupid ass channel when not at home, trade grocery cards(please make sure you cant cash a check with it) and lend you cell phone to your aged aunt selma who couldnt figure out how to use it if her life depended on it.

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.

This *can* promote diversity in choices

[TFloore]

This is yet another point where your initial viewpoint influences the conclusion you arrive at.

Instead of "this will drive products to centrist crap" you can have a different perspective on this. One thing this will allow, is to provide a "guaranteed audience" for just about any genre you care to name. And provide a way to get access ot that audience.

You like movies about obscure topic X. Most movie companies don't bother making such movies, because the marketting costs involved in informing you that the movie exists are too high for the small size of the market. If, instead, you can simply send an email out to everyone that likes these movies, your marketting costs just dropped like a rock. Your audience is suddenly aware of your movie, and, one can hope, if it doesn't suck too much people will actually see/rent/buy it. But no one will see/rent/buy it if they don't know about it.

This *can* make it more economical to target smaller audiences by decreasing the costs of communicating with that audience.

Will it acutally be done that way? Well, that's where your initial preconceptions come into play. :)

Less worse than Amazon, probably...

[wirefarm]

I live in Japan and have been renting videos from Tsutaya for years.
In Japan, for a huge number of young people, the keitai (cell phone) is the primary phone - they don't have another one in their apartment.
So when you sign up at Tsutaya, they want your keitai number. Big deal. I'll bet Blockbuster has your phone number, too.
Over here, it used to be that your keitai number was also your email - 09012345678@docomo.ne.jp - most people have changed it to something a bit less spammable. (I don't know anyone who hasn't changed it.)
So, most likely, Tsutaya doesn't have any linked information, unless you've offered to link it for them via their website...

I just don't see how this relates exclusively to Japan or to advanced CRM or keitais: the same thing could have been done 100 years ago by your library using postcards.

Keitais are not so advanced here that they can tell when you are watching a movie or close to a store. Perhaps you get an occasional email on your phone. (I've never gotten one.) This is not particularly Big-Brother-ish.

Blockbuster already knows what movies you rent from them, what days you rent, how often you pick a foreign film, a soft-core, a sci-fi, new release, whatever. They also have your phone number and maybe your email, if you signed up for some promotion or "member's club" on their website.

This is completely a non-story.
Any website that ties browsing to any real-world activity can do this.
If blockbuster.com or bestbuy.com has a page where you can enter your personal info and you actually do, you can bet that you will be tracked in this way.
It's not really an invasion of privacy if you are opting in...

Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo