Beacons help brands target consumers on the show floor

DETROIT -- Visitors to this year's Detroit auto show will get to play a 2016 version of "Pac-Man" -- without the ghosts.

That's how the show's organizers describe the way they're using beacons, wireless digital transmitters located around the exhibition hall that can track the movements of show visitors and communicate with them through their smartphones via Bluetooth as they wander the show floor.

The technology is growing in popularity as auto show organizers and manufacturers seek more ways for brands to interact with the throngs of spectators on a scale that the product specialists manning the displays never could achieve.

Detroit's Cobo Center will be fitted with 30 beacons programmed to interact with the show's smartphone app and help visitors navigate a reconfigured floorplan. App users will see a map of the exhibit floor that's marked with empty red circles. As the users cross a particular area of the show, the circles get checked off to let them know they visited that area.

Visitors who make their way past all 30 beacons get a message congratulating them on viewing the entire show and asking them to enter an email address for a chance to win prizes. The show partnered with IBM to develop the app.

"This came about because 70 percent of the show floor is new this year," said Max Muncey, spokesman for the North American International Auto Show. "A lot of the major brands have moved to totally new locations. It's a fun way to make it engaging for visitors to get around."

This is the first time the Detroit event is using beacons showwide to engage with spectators, but brands such as Ford already have done so on their own. In 2015, Ford placed 11 beacons on an F-150 during the show to deliver messages to attendees about the pickup's features when they stood near it. 

While this year's beacon effort will focus on wayfinding, Muncey said, the show plans to roll out even more of the technology's messaging capabilities in the future. 

Some of those capabilities have been tested at other recent shows, including beacons that can record which vehicle displays had the most repeat visits or the longest dwell times. Auto shows can relay these data so brands can analyze them and improve their exhibits in the years to come.

The Chicago Auto Show did a pilot run with beacons last year with four automakers, and having confirmed the potential marketing benefit, it's making them available to all exhibitors for the 2016 show, which begins next month. 

In 2015, beacons at the Ford, Chevrolet, Volvo and Nissan displays sent 40,000 messages to visitors, with 5,000 of them being opened. The messages went to visitors who downloaded the show's app, but only after they had spent a certain amount of time at a display. 

The Chicago show's app was downloaded nearly 35,000 times in 2015, and a show official expects 75,000 to 100,000 downloads for this year's show. 

In 2015, automakers found that beacons with specific calls to action, such as offers for test drives and gift cards, were most effective at "converting," or getting users to click over to whatever promotion the brand is running, said Mark Bilek, senior director of communications and technology for the Chicago Auto Show. 

Beacon transmissions like these earned a conversion rate of 35 percent, while weaker performers tallied rates around 5 to 10 percent, Bilek said.

Brands can make messaging changes on the fly and move their beacons around during the show if their previous approaches don’t appear to be working.

Exhibitors will have to pay to use the beacons that the Chicago show is offering, with pricing tiers based on the level of detail in the data returned to the brand. 

At Tier I, an exhibitor will know, in aggregate, how much time people spend at the show and how many brand displays they visited. 

For Tier II, brands also will learn how much time was spent at their own displays. 

Tier III adds details on how much time was spent at other displays, among other things. 

While auto shows are bastions of competition, Bilek said brands won't be able to use beacons to take direct digs at one another. 

"They can't say to a person standing next to a Cadillac ATS, for example, 'Our car won car of the year, BMW didn't,'" Bilek said.

The San Diego International Auto Show is coming off its first use of beacons. 

The show, which took place Dec. 31 to Jan. 3, partnered with beacon provider Piper to develop a consumer app that connects with the devices. The app also helped users purchase tickets and get information about parking and other services. 

Ford, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Volkswagen, Nissan, Toyota and Subaru all opted to use the show's beacons, each about the size of a deck of cards. The brands are being sent reports about engagement and attendee behaviors such as dwell time. 

The San Diego show decided to go with beacons after hearing how some manufacturers had been using the devices on their own, but the results weren't as good as they'd hoped. 

A glaring problem was that visitors had to download separate apps for each brand to receive beacon transmissions from them. It made more sense to develop a single show app available to any brand that could be aggressively promoted to drive adoption, said Kevin Leap, director of the San Diego International Auto Show. 

"If you can't get enough people to download the app, then it's not a useful technology," Leap said. 

This was the first time Piper has done an auto show. But Robert Hanczor, Piper's CEO, said Piper has 10 dealer clients around the country using beacons to communicate with customers and employees. 

When using beacons for employee engagement, Hanczor said, stores will beam information to staffers about sales goals to keep them motivated and informed. 

"Proximity technology is very simple in its raw form," he said, "and what we're seeing is more and more creativity on the part of automotive companies and enterprise businesses that service the industry in using the technology in innovative ways."