Public transportation is getting digital: good news for ecommerce!
Change
is coming very fast regarding transportation today. Public transportation has
to grown and change significantly to face the growing number of users and their
new expectations. A bunch of carpool startups have been created in the last
decade such as Uber, Lyft, Heetch making public transportation old-fashioned
for a lot of people.
To
take part in the smartest-cities of the world race, Paris announced this
month that it plans to have the most digital metro in the world by 2025 with
new innovative infrastructures such as optical fiber,
data centers, telecom networks, Wi-fi and geolocation system. Parisian
subway is getting digitalized in order to help people gain a lot of times when
they have to go from a point A to a point B. But this is not the only issue.
Paris metro has always been an important place for
advertisers. Indeed, there is almost 5 millions of users everyday. Those users
are consumers and you can easily grab their attention : when their are in
the metro they do not have much to do, people are waiting their train and
then, they wait in the train to arrive at their destination. Well... that was
before. Today, everybody is on its smartphone. That’s why bringing wifi,
geolocation and big datas where millions of consumers pass everyday will revolutionize ads in public
transportation.
Users experience will be improved and users will be able
to buy anything during their journey : 1 online purchase out of 4 is made with
a smartphone today and this figure keeps on increasing. Today, it is
complicated to buy while you are in the metro because you do not want to take the risk to see your
connection shut down. With big data analyse, retargeting and Wifi, you’ll
find that your journey in the metro will probably become the right place and
time for you to do your shopping.
Be
able to track people on public transportation will have a big impact on digital
marketing. Indeed, public transportation says a lot about you: where you live,
where you work, at what time, where you go for shopping. It means that we can
deduce your social background, define your favorite brands, push ads for you
that matches your preferences, inform you to go out at a certain station for a
special event etc… But who can gather all those data? Well, on the road,
companies such as Waze already deals with a huge amount of datas and has an
important impact on advertising. An other app, Moovit could become the Waze of
the metro.
Actually,
startups like Waze and Moovit (an israelian app created in 2014) had the idea
that the most efficient way to simplify rides does not lie into high technology
object but definetly onto people who are using those transportation system
every day. They are creating a network where everyone can be a stakeholder.
Waze’s business model is based on advertising using CPM and it has been bought by
Google for 1.15 billion $ two years ago.
Moovit works directly with the parisian public transportation company
RATP to help it improve their service in cities and in return the RATP is
promoting the company. Nowadays, every companies are looking for this kind of
win-win situation.
Will Moovit know the same success story as Waze ? If it expends to other big cities metros, we can bet that Google will look closely at their activities.
Marine Esposito
Julia Ibrahim - Ouali
Sources
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