Greg Hrinya, Associate Editor02.25.15
Thinfilm, a leader in printed electronics and smart systems, has collaborated with alcoholic beverage provider Diageo on a bottle enhancement designed to improve the customer experience. This is not your grandfather’s bottle of scotch.
The partners will unveil a prototype of a Johnnie Walker Blue Label smart bottle at Mobile World Congress. The event will take place over four days from March 2-5, 2015, in Barcelona, Spain.
This connected smart bottle uses printed sensor tags featuring Thinfilm’s OpenSense technology. OpenSense detects both the sealed and opened state of each bottle. The tags and the contained sensor information will also allow Diageo to send personalized communications to consumers who read the tags with their smartphones.
The patent-pending OpenSense technology utilizes a smartphone’s Near Field Communication (NFC) capabilities. Diageo can track bottle movements across the supply chain, in-store and to the point of consumption, with the sensor tags remaining readable even when the factory seal has been broken. This provides an additional layer of security in protecting the authenticity of the product.
“This particular label that we’re announcing is an NFC label that detects whether a product has remained in a factory field state,” says Jennifer Ernst, chief strategy officer at Thinfilm. “We do that by essentially having a tail that comes off of the NFC tag and can be wrapped around the closure of the container. It then can be put over the top of the bottle cap and sealed into the closures. When that tail is intact, you get one code from the NFC tag, and when the tail has been broken, you get a different code. So the NFC has two different states of communication, depending on whether the product is opened or closed.”
This new design is intended to foster further engagement with the customer and bring the companies closer to the Internet of Everything. The bottle utilizes printed-dopant polysilicon technology. Thinfilm then uses a combination of steps, including screen printing and additives, to produce the printed tags. They’re printed on a metal foil and then cut into little pieces and attached to an antenna, which is what has the conductive tail.
Consumers will receive marketing messages, both at retail and after the purchase, which will include promotional offers, cocktail recipes and exclusive content. By tapping the phone to the product, a customer can tell if the bottle has been opened, or he or she may choose to receive any number of additional materials provided by the companies.
“Our collaboration with Thinfilm allows us to explore all the amazing new possibilities enabled by smart-bottles for consumers, retailers and our own business,” says Helen Michels, global innovation director at Diageo’s Futures Team. “It sets the bar for technology innovation in the drinks industry.”
The technology has the ability to tailor personalized content for the user. For example, a customer who consistently buys a certain type of product might find recommendations based on previous purchases. “If a cosmetics company can engage me on the level that allows them to know which colors of mascara I bought, which eyeliners I bought, which color of foundation I bought, it’s fairly easy to build a recommendation to offer me different kinds of eye shadow looks, different products I might want to experiment with in the evening and day time,” adds Ernst. “It’s that ability to build brand loyalty to a very precise market of one.”
According to Thinfilm, the tags are also completely and permanently encoded at the point of manufacture and cannot be copied or electrically modified in order to ensure authenticity.
QR codes have a fixed amount of data and often deal with counterfeit threats. “It’s very easy to replicate a QR code,” explains Ernst. “It’s easy to set up systems that hack or bypass the codes. People that are using QR codes for anti-counterfeit (measures) are seeing them hacked, sometimes within a month of rollout.”
According to Ernst, NFC tags are like snowflakes. “With this particular NFC tag, the data that goes on the tag when it leaves the factory has a unique identifier for every single product,” she adds. “Every individual bottle, every individual cosmetic, every individual item is factory encoded; it cannot be tampered with once it leaves the factory. If someone tries to alter it, it will render the tag useless so you can’t divert it to some other kind of website. You can’t change where it routs.”
While this technology has undergone testing in recent years, the products are starting to make their way out into the market. “The field of printed electronics is an area where there’s been a lot of development historically,” says Ernst. “These are products that are now available for purchase and coming out this year. People have heard about printed electronics for a while, and this is here now, stuff in market, real products that are available to use and enjoy.”
The partners will unveil a prototype of a Johnnie Walker Blue Label smart bottle at Mobile World Congress. The event will take place over four days from March 2-5, 2015, in Barcelona, Spain.
This connected smart bottle uses printed sensor tags featuring Thinfilm’s OpenSense technology. OpenSense detects both the sealed and opened state of each bottle. The tags and the contained sensor information will also allow Diageo to send personalized communications to consumers who read the tags with their smartphones.
The patent-pending OpenSense technology utilizes a smartphone’s Near Field Communication (NFC) capabilities. Diageo can track bottle movements across the supply chain, in-store and to the point of consumption, with the sensor tags remaining readable even when the factory seal has been broken. This provides an additional layer of security in protecting the authenticity of the product.
“This particular label that we’re announcing is an NFC label that detects whether a product has remained in a factory field state,” says Jennifer Ernst, chief strategy officer at Thinfilm. “We do that by essentially having a tail that comes off of the NFC tag and can be wrapped around the closure of the container. It then can be put over the top of the bottle cap and sealed into the closures. When that tail is intact, you get one code from the NFC tag, and when the tail has been broken, you get a different code. So the NFC has two different states of communication, depending on whether the product is opened or closed.”
This new design is intended to foster further engagement with the customer and bring the companies closer to the Internet of Everything. The bottle utilizes printed-dopant polysilicon technology. Thinfilm then uses a combination of steps, including screen printing and additives, to produce the printed tags. They’re printed on a metal foil and then cut into little pieces and attached to an antenna, which is what has the conductive tail.
Consumers will receive marketing messages, both at retail and after the purchase, which will include promotional offers, cocktail recipes and exclusive content. By tapping the phone to the product, a customer can tell if the bottle has been opened, or he or she may choose to receive any number of additional materials provided by the companies.
“Our collaboration with Thinfilm allows us to explore all the amazing new possibilities enabled by smart-bottles for consumers, retailers and our own business,” says Helen Michels, global innovation director at Diageo’s Futures Team. “It sets the bar for technology innovation in the drinks industry.”
The technology has the ability to tailor personalized content for the user. For example, a customer who consistently buys a certain type of product might find recommendations based on previous purchases. “If a cosmetics company can engage me on the level that allows them to know which colors of mascara I bought, which eyeliners I bought, which color of foundation I bought, it’s fairly easy to build a recommendation to offer me different kinds of eye shadow looks, different products I might want to experiment with in the evening and day time,” adds Ernst. “It’s that ability to build brand loyalty to a very precise market of one.”
According to Thinfilm, the tags are also completely and permanently encoded at the point of manufacture and cannot be copied or electrically modified in order to ensure authenticity.
QR codes have a fixed amount of data and often deal with counterfeit threats. “It’s very easy to replicate a QR code,” explains Ernst. “It’s easy to set up systems that hack or bypass the codes. People that are using QR codes for anti-counterfeit (measures) are seeing them hacked, sometimes within a month of rollout.”
According to Ernst, NFC tags are like snowflakes. “With this particular NFC tag, the data that goes on the tag when it leaves the factory has a unique identifier for every single product,” she adds. “Every individual bottle, every individual cosmetic, every individual item is factory encoded; it cannot be tampered with once it leaves the factory. If someone tries to alter it, it will render the tag useless so you can’t divert it to some other kind of website. You can’t change where it routs.”
While this technology has undergone testing in recent years, the products are starting to make their way out into the market. “The field of printed electronics is an area where there’s been a lot of development historically,” says Ernst. “These are products that are now available for purchase and coming out this year. People have heard about printed electronics for a while, and this is here now, stuff in market, real products that are available to use and enjoy.”