Is 2015 Going to Be the Year of the Robot?

The advent of robotic technology in Asia further showcases how programmatic may be taking over the digital marketing ecosystem. Will 2015 be the year of the robot?

This month Nestlé will deploy its newly developed humanoid robot, named Pepper, across 20 home appliance stores in Japan in an effort to enhance brand engagement with customers and to help sell its signature coffee machines in a continually saturated market.

Pepper will be the first robot in the world that will be able to read and respond to human emotion through its patented emotion recognition technology that was developed by Softbank. Through this technology Pepper is able to read customer’s facial expressions and listen to their tone of voice to analyze how people are feeling and to guide them in the right direction through the purchase funnel.

According to Softbank’s chief executive (CEO), Masayoshi Son, “We hope that providing people the opportunity to interact with a robot whilst shopping, we can help create experiences of wonder and delight for consumers.” Nestlé plans to embed Pepper in around 1,000 stores by the end of 2015.

Check out Pepper in action below:

Engineers at Softbank claim Pepper can comprehend around 80 percent of conversations and has the ability to learn from these conversations to provide more relevant and useful answers for future customer interactions.

In a survey at the Mirror, one of the U.K.’s most popular tabloid newspapers, 53 percent of respondents stated they would feel comfortable buying a coffee machine from a robot.

In an industry where all things are heading programmatic, is this just another example, albeit, in retail form, where computers are taking over. In a 2014 report by BrandScreen, they forecasted a 70 percent increase in programmatic buying in Asia. Earlier this year we saw fortune 500 brands the likes of American Express and P&G massively shift toward programmatic. P&G alone made a public statement that their aim is to buy 70 percent of digital ads programmatically.

Obviously, programmatic offers a variety of benefits like better targeting, greater efficiency, and the collection and real-time access to greater and richer data. One could argue that this move toward robots, like Pepper, can offer similar benefits. By detecting a shopper’s face in-store and combining it with people counters, retailers like Nestlé can get a clearer profile of their customer base and adapt signage and merchandising to attract and engage more customers. This is absolutely happening right now across a variety of brands in multiple countries, even with ever-stricter privacy laws coming into play.

In September of this year, Val Morgan rolled out facial recognition technology to almost 500 petrol pump ad display units in Australia to serve ads programmatically to those filling their cars based on age, gender, and mood. “Within milliseconds, we are able to determine, with about 95 percent accuracy, a person’s gender, approximate age, and even make an estimation based on their facial expression of the type of mood they are in,” said Anthony Deeble, managing director of Val Morgan Outdoor. Based on this human interaction data collection in real-time, Val Morgan is then able to serve up programmatic ads that are most relevant and targeted to that specific individual.

Ideally, these are the benefits that Pepper should be able to provide Nestlé across its 1,000 stores. By syncing the data that Pepper collects in real-time to display areas in-store, at the counter, on a person’s mobile device, and while on commute back home, through retargeting they should enable a more complete brand engagement experience and provide more unique and creative touch points for the person to get excited and purchase.

However, this could also prove to be “brand overload” on behalf of consumers. The brands that utilize this real-time data in a creative and smart way will be the ones that succeed and stand out.

Personally, I believe that integrating unique store activations through the use of robots like Pepper will make for an interesting experience, and brand adoption will only increase, particularly as they start to figure out how they can smartly leverage this real-time data in ways that prove value for consumers.

Image via Shutterstock.

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