This Week - with Frank Romano

Hi.  This is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  Welcome back to another episode.

In the news recently, appearing in both the Wall Street Journal and many other publications, was an inflammation that Wal-Mart plans to use Smart Tags.

By the way, the terminology that's being used is rather interesting.  The Wall Street Journal calls them Radio Tags.  We all know that they're RFID: Radio Frequency Identification and that is part of the new world of electronic printing, if you will.  Photoconductive printing where you use photoconductive inks made of silver or copper or other elements that can conduct electricity and today we can print the batteries, we can print the antenna, we can print some of the circuitry.  The one thing we can't print is the actual chip; the computer part of it, if you will.  Although, there are great strides being made.

Now the concept at Wal-Mart is -- and there's a drawing in the Wall Street Journal -- is that these tags will go on clothing and that with a scanner someone in the store will be able to see if they have the proper number of sizes in inventory for that particular product.  So they want to track their clothing in terms of what's in the store, what's in inventory.  They already do this in their warehouses; they put tags now on the skids going into the warehouse and the concept of a warehouse now changes because you can put things anywhere because now the RFID tags allow you to find whatever it is and route it to the truck or wherever it has to go.

The issue evidently is privacy; this is becoming one of the great issues of our time, in terms of our privacy, because now with the Internet being trackable, people keeping track through cookies of everything I do on the Internet, where I go, what I do there.  I love the little tag -- the little note that's on here.  It says, "Privacy advocates worry tags expose consumers to the possibility that criminals or unscrupulous marketers will scan their garbage to learn their purchasing behavior."

I already have people going through my garbage looking for cans and bottles, by the way, so I'm not worried about that part of it.

But I can understand we have somehow have to balance the privacy aspects with new interesting marketing.  If you think privacy with these kinds of tags is a problem, how about this story out of Brazil where one of the largest companies in consumer marketing Unilever has a detergent called Omo and in 50 boxes they put a GPS tracking device.  It was activated as soon as you took the box off the shelf and then they were able to track you.  And it's a case of you not looking for the prize.  The prize comes after you I guess because now the people were now tracking these 50 people in terms of where they went with their box of detergent.

I can tell you where they went.  They went home and they put it into their washing machine.  I don't think they did anything else with it.

All this information about what's happening with the Smart Tags, Radio Tags, RFID, I believe the next big thing, the thing that will bring the printing industry back to where it was will be when we can actually print the entire electronic tag, including the chip. It's not too far away.  Again, all the pieces are starting to come together.

I think at that point, the printing industry will come back to its preeminence because not only will it open up the entire world of packaging because every package then will have to have it.  It will replace the barcode.  You will not have to have someone moving things past the scanner.  Everything will be read electronically right in your cart.  You'll be able to track things in your cart as you're going along; it'll keep adding things up for you and telling you if you got a sale or you got a discount or whatever it would be.

So, this is an important part of packaging but then it will be built into other products: promotional materials, direct mail.  It'll have links of various kinds; link to your cell phone, link to your computer, link to your television set.  A link eventually to signage, so that as you're passing by the signage, whatever it is, it says, "Hello Frank!"  As we saw there was a movie called Minority Report where they did that.

So I think that this is all coming together but it's probably a few years away.  I mean, it's been a few years away for several years but my feeling is that today we see more activity than ever better, more progress being made in printing with electronics.

So I think what Wal-Mart wants to do, which by the way will then be replicated by Target and K-Mart and Kohl's and all those other stores, now as long as they're a big box stores that will be the case.  If we buy everything on the Internet, well you still need to keep track of your inventory even there.

But next big thing, look for it very carefully and watch out for printed electronics.  Take care.

Next time...

Of course, then the nun would find out and catch you and then beat you but that was a different story.