Tesco – Then and Now
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
Our friends over at the Shopping behaviour specialist ShopperCentric (they like to distinguish between shopping behaviour and consumer bahaviour) have written an interesting research report on the new look TescoScreens.
You can download it below…
http://www.shoppercentric.com/
It’s worthwhile recapping where TescoTV was and where TescoScreens is now.
Remember that whilst mistakes were so obviously made early on with TescoTV, these guys were pioneers and it’s the pioneers who always get the arrows in their backs!
TescoTV was initially an Advertising Driven business model – JC Decaux were chosen to sell advertising space (as if it were a billboard).
Instrumental Media Group and Applied Television Group managed the network using Scala InfoChannel with distribution over the Hughes Satellite network.
The whole deployment ‘allegedly’ cost just over £30 Million – with only just 100 stores that is a hell of a hefty bill and some of the vendors and suppliers were obviously ‘quids-in’ with these sorts of fees.
Dunnhumby took over the media side of the network from JC Decaux last November (not the middle of this year as ShopperCentric suggest in their report – that was just the re-branding exercise from ‘TV’ epithet to ‘Screens’ suffix).
With Dunnhumby’s skills and experience, TescoScreens is now focusing on trade marketing (as the majority of people said that it should have done from day one).
Yes this is easy to say with hindsight but common sense surely is that, especially for a Grocer, advertising things on screens that you sell on the shelves was ‘sensible’ to say the least.
The new content wheel is full of Tesco suppliers paying around UK PDS 5,000 for a couple of 5 second slots in 5 minute loops (rather than JC Decaux customers advertising their brands).
It’s my understanding that Dunnhumby are not averse (again) to bringing in 3rd party media sales revenue at some stage soon.
And of course the RFP for a changing of the guard in terms of network management / ownership and technology providers is due out very soon now.
October 19th, 2007 at 20:56 @914
It’s good to see Tesco stuck with it and kept trying new things. It’s easy to treat it like another medium and when that doesn’t work give up.