“Walgreens Replaced Fridge Doors With Smart Screens. It\u2019s Now a $200 Million Fiasco”<\/em>. In summary, a startup promised Walgreens that its high-tech fridges would track shoppers and spark an in-store advertising revolution. Then the project fails miserably for a number of reasons.<\/p>\nIt’s probably a terrible idea to block the view of soft drinks, which customers can literally touch anyway, with a digital screen. If the digital screens are offline for any reason, the contents are completely invisible (that’s why they had to put signs on the doors explaining what’s inside!).<\/p>\n
But why was this idea even executed in the first place? Apparently, Walgreens signed a 10-year contract and initially had 10,000 smart doors installed. So why more than a limited experiment in the first place?<\/p>\n
My answer is bad data, bad analysis: a poor understanding of causal modeling and data centricity.<\/p>\n
Here is a four-sentence summary from the article:<\/p>\n
Expectation vs. reality 1:<\/p>\n
“Pilot data showed the screens resulting in more than a 5% incremental sales jump, and Walgreens committed to installing them in an additional 50 stores the next year as part of a decade-long deal.”<\/em><\/p>\n“Walgreens says each smart door ended up bringing in just $215 that year, or a mere 59\u00a2 a day, about half the contractual minimum and a pittance when measured against the thousands of dollars each door cost to build and install.”<\/em><\/p>\nExpectation vs. reality 2:<\/p>\n
“Cooler Screens had outsourced sales of available advertising slots for its fridges to Yahoo, then a subsidiary of its investor Verizon. But Yahoo barely topped $3 million in sales for the fridges in 2021, 91% lower than projected, a Cooler Screens court filing said.”<\/em><\/p>\nGrand finale:<\/p>\n
The startup “claimed that its displays garnered almost 100 million monthly impressions and gave brands a healthy sales bounce, but these people doubted the math, which was tracked in spreadsheets.”<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[Click title for image] Just read this article at Bloomberg “Walgreens Replaced Fridge Doors With Smart Screens. It\u2019s Now a $200 Million Fiasco”. In summary, a startup promised Walgreens that its high-tech fridges would track shoppers and spark an in-store advertising revolution. Then the project fails miserably for a number of reasons. It’s probably a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1212,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1211"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1471,"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1211\/revisions\/1471"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ozer.gt\/log\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}