Auras comes alive on web site
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Despite minor teething troubles, MercedesBenz's Actros Live! web site provided live web-based coverage of interviews with Actros customers on the road over io days. But what did the company get out of it—and was anyone watching? Robin Meczes finds out.
• The uses to which the Internet is now being put are many and varied, as Mercedes-Benz proved recently with its Actros Live! scheme—essentially 10 days of live broadcasts of operators being interviewed driving its trucks in their everyday operations.
It started slightly later than scheduled on day one as a result of a technical hitch, and the McLaren Formula 1 team had to back out at the last minute, but overall the experiment went well and, while picture quality was not the best we've seen (a result of cramming it down a phone network), a one-hour live broadcast was made dally at 11:00hrs for the duration of the pilot project.
By the end of the final day 6,300 users had logged on to the Actros Live! ate and accessed a total of 65,000 pages from It, with 210 questions e-mailed in and 183 hopefuls entering the online competition to win tickets to the Silverstone Grand Prix by guessing the daily mileage of the Actros rigs.
Possibly the best reaction, from Mercedes' point of view, was that 44 Actros test drives were arranged.
There's more to come, as the site (Www.actroslive.co.uk) will stay open for a couple more weeks showing edited highlights of the 10-day trial.
Awareness
John Baker, general manager of M-B's truck marketing department, says: "We wanted to see what we could do that was a bit different. We felt that even if the site got no hits at all, this would still tell us something. At the very least we knew the site would raise awareness of MercedesBenz's level of technology, and the benefits of that are hard to measure' The 10 users featured in the promotion were all happy to take part, he adds: "In general, they were very receptive. Some fleets even re-routed their trucks to help us out." The dealers involved were particularly keen to gain exposure on the Internet—and other M-B dealers would like to have been included. "We've had a number of them ring us up to ask why they weren't involved," says Baker, "but we had to restrict it to ten."
It's too early to judge what the average operator thought about it all, but Baker hopes it will help them appreciate the connection between the Actros and technology. "When we launched the Actros a couple of years ago there was resistance from some operators at the launch because of the high technology incorporated in it, but that resistance is no longer there today," he says.
The success of Actros Live! means MB's use of the Internet is likely to be extended over the next year or so, Baker adds. Among other things, the company would like to put cost tables on an interactive site to allow operators to enter their actual running costs and compare them to an average.
They can already do that on paper, but as Baker points out: "This way they would get an instant resift from a constant on-line service."
Another option is to use the Web to help support dealer activities. In particular, Baker is keen to see M-B establish a centrally maintained Webbased customer database which dealers could lag onto to look for customer information, enter queries, and so on.
Information
A wide range of vehicle information will continue to be made available, although Baker doesn't expect to be selling new vehicles online: "Some products, such as books or CDs, are made to be ordered via the Internet,' he says. "But I don't think items of caprtal equipment really lend themselves to Internet purchasing."
It might be a different story on the used truck front. "People who browse for used trucks are generally wanting to make a purchase," Baker remarks, Fle expects trucks from the Signature used vehicle scheme to be offered on an openaccess site sometime next year.
But are truck buyers really web surfers P Baker reports: "Of the 9,000 or so companies on our database running tractive units, 1,500 have internet access." And within a few years, he believes, this technology will become the norm: "The information will be there for people who want it, and one thing you shouldn't underestimate is how quickly things are changing.
"We're very pleased with what we've done," Baker concludes. Total costs for the project, including promotion, produc tion of the CD-ROM distributed via CM and mailed direct to M-B's internet-ready customers, and all staff and running costs involved with the Web site itself, were in the order of £85,000-90,000.
So was it a cost-effective exercise? Baker takes a businesslike view: "Ask me in a year's time!".
THE TECHNOLOGY
• In order to broadcast over the Web, M-B mounted a special camera and sound equipment in the cab of the operator being featured on any given day with a second camera providing an outside view from a support vehicle travelling in front of the Actros.
Sound and video from the cab were sent by radio to the support vehicle, digitized and then forwarded over 12 mobile phone lines coordinated by a separate computer to the German HQ for incorporation Into the Actros Live! web site.
According to Philippe Mourges, head of the five-man support team working out of the company's Milton Keynes site, this process took no longer than 30 seconds, making the website transmission only slightly out of synch with real time.
E-mail queries sent in by surfers also handled by Mourges team in Milton Keynes and forwarded by them to the support vehicle out on the road. Mourges' team was also responsible for the live text feature; a realtime transcript of the conversation taking place within the Actros that could be accessed even where the video feed was unavailable.
Mourges agrees with Baker that the exercise was a success. "From what we have seen daily, most users have visited the site between 11:00 and 12:00hrs, when the live feed has been taking place, so there was a genuine interest in the live side of it," he says. "On average they have spent around 30 minutes each on line."