I go to the gym quite often though not as often as I wish. This idea popped up when I was running on a treadmill. I run for nearly half an hour on average and don’t have anything to do that entire duration but stare at increasing LED numbers on a black background screen. Advertisers and marketers struggle for audience attention for a few seconds on various media. They have got customers in the gym for hours but they have not exploited this avenue.
Ok, the gist is that the machines in a gym have to be made more intelligent (more technically advanced) so that they can understand who is working out on them and what he is interested in and show them that very thing. The current version 15 inches LED screen in the gym can be turned into a more advanced display like computer screens, better if they are touch screens so that interaction can be better. These machines can be connected to the web where an online application can monitor which user is currently working out so that it can display user-specific advertisements. Machines can get to know about user info either through users’ memory-stick or by extracting info from users’ mobile phones. These days most folks have GPRS/3G phones so it won’t be very difficult for machines to interact with the phone to get the info. Once this connection is established then it’s like any other media, but with a better attention span, where the user is yours and you can engage him by various measures.
So marketers/gym equipment makers there lies an unexplored opportunity where First-mover advantage will surely be a huge business opportunity.
**this is just a high-level idea. Implementation details like which economical computer screen (plus processor) needs to be put on machines that can withstand the gym’s environment, how to connect machines to the mobile phone, which medium (cable, WiFi, WiMax) can be used by machines to connect with the application, how the application will look like and what all features it will have, etc can be easily handled with a meticulous plan. Nearly all of these features are already implemented in parts in various places they just need to be mashed to cater to our needs.
PS: This post was originally posted on hoodasaurabh.blogspot.com