Startups’ Tech For Displaying Ads On Walgreens Cooler Doors Is On Fire…Literally

We tend to talk a lot around here about advertising, given how closely intertwined tech and digital industries tend to be with ads and the like. And frankly, given how often we've beat the drum that advertising is content and content is advertising, it's become all the more clear in these modern times that good advertising really is useful if not also entertaining, while bad advertising is far worse today in comparison to bad advertising from times past.

But when the advertising is wrong, or the platform cumbersome to use, doesn't work, or even (for example) occasionally sparks a fire, that takes it all to a whole new level. I'll preface this by saying that we're going to talk about a lawsuit for which I have not seen the court filings, because the website for Cook County Illinois, where you're supposed to be able to look up case filings, is broken beyond repair. So we'll have to rely on Wall Street Journal's reporting on this, covering startup Cooler Screens lawsuit against Walgreens for exiting a contract between the two companies.

A test byWalgreensof technology that replaced some cooler doors with digital screens that play ads has ended in acrimony. The digital screens' vendor, Cooler Screens, is suing the pharmacy chain, saying that Walgreens obstructed an agreed-upon nationwide rollout of the internet-connected doors and demanded their removal from stores, according to court documents.

Walgreens, meanwhile, says the technology from Cooler Screens didn't work. The retailer said it ended its agreement with the vendor in February, according to the court documents.

Customer experience is a top priority for Walgreens, and we terminated our contract with Cooler Screens earlier this year due to their failure to meet contractual obligations," Walgreens senior communications directorEmily Hartwig-Mekstansaid.

I've actually seen these things in production, having a Walgreens I visit on occasion a couple of blocks from my office in downtown Chicago. I never really paid much attention to them, but did notice on more than one occasion that the contents of the cooler didn't match what was on the digital front of the cooler door. It's been an occasional annoyance for a couple of years now.

But that doesn't appear to be the extent of the issues with these Cooler Screens. The screens are supposed to show a variety of things when someone walks up to them, cycling between targeted ads for goods within the store, information about items that are on sale, the content within the cooler itself since you can no longer see through the door, and the pricing for that content. They look something like this GIF, taken from Cooler Screens own website:

But according to Walgreens, there are all kinds of problems with these screens, including some dangerous problems that make them decidedly less than cool.

But technical issues meant the simple act of grabbing a soda from a smart cooler could be fraught with frustration and even danger, according to court documents filed by Walgreens with the Cook County Circuit Court in Illinois.

The doors' digital screens regularly froze or went dark, preventing customers from seeing what was available inside, and some even sparked and caught fire, according to the court documents. The screens also often showed the wrong products or prices, or didn't show when products were out of stock, according to the documents.

For its part, Cooler Screens is blaming Walgreens for all of the above. It says the fires were due to poor electrical work and bad coolers. The stock and pricing problems are said to have been Walgreens' fault for not providing accurate information to Cooler Screens to display. The lack of ad revenue Walgreens was able to collect was due to it not allowing the full rollout of the product to all 2,500 contracted stores and only to 700 of them due, well, you know, the fires and the wrongness and all of that.

But there's such a thing as QA testing and this doesn't seem to be working at all. And I can tell you, being in the technology industry myself, that you don't agree to roll out a product to a customer without doing the due diligence to ensure it will work properly. Yes, there are things that a customer may be responsible for, but you don't agree to put a product in place that could start a fire if the customer hasn't held up its end of the bargain, period, paragraph.

Notably, Cooler Screens, which has Microsoft as a backer, also isn't sharing some of the relevant information when it comes to its performance metrics.

Microsoft-backed Cooler Screens said it has not removed its technology from Walgreens stores. It declined to comment on its roster of advertisers and current clients, although it said it operates a nationwide network of nearly 11,000 screens.Gregory Wasson, a former chief executive of Walgreens, is one ofCooler Screens' co-founders.

CVS Healthhad tested Cooler Screens' technology in a small number of stores, but no longer has them installed in any of its locations, a spokesman for the pharmacy chain said.

I suppose something could come of the lawsuit that would change my mind on this, but this has all the stink of a vendor not doing its job properly and now trying to enforce its contract anyway.