Moodie Davitt Interview: Talking partnership, data and new consumer audiences with Intelligent Track Systems
Danish company Intelligent Track Systems (ITS), in collaboration with Blueprint, is maintaining an ambitious roll-out programme for its ‘smart’ shopping trolleys, with the number of airport partners expected to reach 15 by the end of this year.
That’s according to Managing Director Morten Pankoke, speaking to The Moodie Davitt Report about the opportunity for airports, concessionaires and brand owners that the trolleys represent for consumer marketing, sales and data gathering.
As reported, ITS trolleys give users information on access routes, departure times, departure gates, product promotions, tax free shopping guidelines and other relevant airport information in their preferred language. They also provide heat mapping data that can be used by airports and concessionaires.
The free-to-use smart carts are mostly used by Gen Z and Millennials, offering access to an emerging age demographic among travellers
The system is accessed through an ITS-programmed tablet, which is placed on a bespoke ITS trolley or an existing airport or shopping trolley. It is activated by passengers via scanning their airline boarding cards.
Hamburg and Vienna airports are among the latest partners to have signed up to offer the ‘intelligent’ trolleys to passengers, after initial trials at San Diego and then Nice Côte d’Azur airports, with Oslo Gardermoen and Riyadh the others to introduce the system recently.
Over the past two years, ITS has extended its reach to ten airport agreements, with six active and four more to be announced in coming weeks. Of the ten to date, Hamburg is the first to have signed up as a long-term partner following the initial trial phase.
Data gathering and analysis is a key selling point for the system, say ITS and Blueprint
Pankoke’s own story (he is also Executive Vice President of CPHI Holding, which owns ITS) is one strongly linked to brand building and consultancy. He worked for 17 years as an influential figure in Denmark’s media, primarily as a TV and radio host, before moving into management and C-level roles. He ran his own consultancy for brands, including powerhouses such as Carlsberg, for eight years.
Using a background in innovation management from the Stanford Research Institute, he helped start-ups grow and was involved in product development across multiple sectors before alighting on the aviation world through CPHI Holding, where he began as an investor before taking a senior executive role.
Pankoke says: “I could see the potential on the innovation side but also there was a strong group spirit [at CPHI] to not just create new products but also new business models that would challenge the status quo.
“At airports you know who is there, for how long they are there and you can do so much if you have the right information. Yet in many ways the aviation industry has not been that innovative. I saw an opportunity with ITS to introduce online experiences in retail into a physical environment.
“We felt that if we could get boarding pass information, and we could start combining that with behavioural and contextual information, then we would be able to generate data that would have a granularity that was not available in the market.”