Last Wednesday Starbucks, in partnership with Yahoo and others, announced the Starbucks Digital Network (SDN), which will be available exclusively in Starbucks locations. A kind of content portal, there will be free access to the Wall Street Journal and enhanced versions of the NY Times and USAToday, all free to Starbucks denizens. Patch is the local news partner.
The content is optimized for various mobile devices: laptops, iPads and smartphones. In addition to Patch, the Wall Street Journal, The NY Times and USA Today, content partners include Apple, GOOD, Bookish Reading Club, New Word City, Nick Jr., Rodale, Zagat and others.
If Starbucks were a wireless carrier we might consider this the “Starbucks Deck.”
I was prepared to “roast” this move; however it’s actually smart as an extension of Starbucks’ lifestyle branding. By itself SDN won’t bring people into stores (though free WiFi does) but it adds value and will enhance the warm-fuzzy feeling that some people equate with Starbucks.
I haven’t seen any discussion of advertising, but it will be there if only in the form of entertainment promotions and movie trailers. However if SDN becomes widely used (millions of uniques) it effectively becomes a kind of digital OOH network as well. Then you’d see Starbucks emerge as an ad network for national brands and maybe SMBs with quite precise geo-targeting capabilities.
Here’s “B roll” footage of people (actors) in stores “experiencing” the new SDN:
Update: Robert Scoble says (per Starbucks) that 30 million people use the company’s US WiFi network on a monthly basis. That would put Starbucks at #30 or #31 on comScore’s Top 50 US sites list.
