The first roundtable presenter at Interop New York was Cisco. Their Enterprise group always brings interesting technology to the table. This time, the one that caught my eye was the Connected Mobile Experience (CMX). CMX is a wireless mobility technology that allows a company to do some advanced marketing wizardry.

CMX uses your Cisco wireless network to monitor devices coming into the air space. They don’t necessarily have to connect to your wireless network for CMX to work. They just have to be beaconing for a network, which all devices do. CMX can then push a message to the device. This message can be a simple “thank you” for coming or something more advanced like a coupon or notification to download a store specific app. CMX can then store the information about that device, such as whether or not they joined the network, where they went, and how long they were there. This gives the company to pull some interesting statistics about their customer base. Even if they never hop on the wireless network.

I have to be honest here. This kind of technology gives me the bit of the creeps. I understand that user tracking is the hot new thing in retail. Stores want to know where you went, how long you stayed there, and whether or not you saw an advertisement or a featured item. They want to know your habits so as to better sell to you. The accumulation of that data over time allows for some patterns to emerge that can drive a retail operation’s decision making process.

A Thought Exercise

Think about an average person. We’ll call him Mike. Mike walks four blocks from his office to the subway station every day after work. He stops at the corner about halfway between to cross a street. On that street just happens to be a coffee shop using something like CMX. Mike has a brand new phone that uses wifi and bluetooth and Mike keeps them on all the time. CMX can detect when the device comes into range. It knows that Mike stays there for about 2 minutes but never joins the network. It then moves out of the WLAN area. The data cruncher for the store wants to drive new customers to the store. They analyze the data and find that lots of people stay in the area for a couple of minutes. They equate this to people stopping to decide if they want to have a cup of coffee from the shop. They decide to create a CMX coupon push notification that pops up after one minute on devices that have been seen in the database for the last month. Mike will see a coupon for $1 off a cup of coffee the next time he waits for the light in front of the coffee shop.

That kind of reach is crazy. I keep thinking back to the scenes in Minority Report where the eye scanners would detect you looking at an advertisement and then target a specific ad based on your retina scan. You may say that’s science fiction. But with products like CMX, I can build a pretty complete profile of your behavior even if I don’t have a retina scan. Correlating information provides a clear picture of who you are without any real identity information. Knowing that someone likes to spend their time in the supermarket in the snack aisles and frozen food aisles and less time in the infants section says a lot. Knowing the route a given device takes through the store can help designers place high volume items in the back and force shoppers to take longer routes past featured items.

Tom’s Take

I’m not saying that CMX is a bad product. It’s providing functionality that can be of great use to retail companies. But, just like VHS recorders and Bittorrent, good ideas can often be used to facilitate things that aren’t as noble. I suggested to the CMX developers that they could implement some kind of “opt out” message that popped up if I hadn’t joined the wireless network in a certain period of time. I look at that as a way of saying to shoppers “We know you aren’t going to join. Press the button and we’ll wipe our your device info.” It puts people at ease to know they aren’t being tracked. Even just showing them what you’re collecting is a good start. With the future of advertising and marketing focusing on instant delivery and data gathering for better targeting, I think the products like CMX will be powerful additions. But, great power requires even greater responsibility.

Tech Field Day Disclaimer

Cisco was a presenter at the Tech Field Day Interop Roundtable.  They did not ask for any consideration in the writing of this review nor were they promised any.  The conclusions and analysis contained in this post are mine and mine alone.