Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. is testing a technology that embeds cameras, sensors and digital screens in the cooler doors in its stores. This will create a new network of "smart" displays that marketers can use to target ads for specific types of shoppers.
The refrigerator and freezer doors act as a digital merchandising platform that depicts the food and drinks inside in their best light, but also as an in-store billboard that can serve ads to consumers who approach, based on variables such as the approximate age the technology believes they are, their gender and the weather.
This new technology could provide brick-and-mortar stores with a marketplace similar to online advertising. Cameras and sensors inside the coolers connected to face-detection technology also can determine which items shoppers picked up or looked at, giving advertisers insight into whether their on-screen promotions worked.
The system is provided by Chicago-based Cooler Screens Inc., the brainchild of Arsen Avakian, the start-up's co-founder and chief executive and the former CEO of Argo Tea Inc. According to an article on wsj.comΒΈ the idea was born in part out of his frustration spending hours in store cooler aisles trying to figure out how to promote Argo's bottled ice teas, he said.