I'd like to kick off a discussion around the use of location (and no, I'm not just refering to GPS) for more targeted uses in mobile advertising.
I have written a longer post on the topic "It's not just privacy concerns preventing mobile advertising from taking off" available at
http://blog.andrewgrill.com/blog/_archives/2007/12/29/3436329.html and I would welcome feedback.
An extract of the article is below
Absolute location solutions such as GPS that provide an exact X,Y location are less attractive for push applications such as mobile advertising as it requires the network to constantly poll the handset to determine where it is and if it has changed location. This is inefficient and can be extremely costly. For a location enabled mobile advertising campaign, if the network had to constantly poll thousands of phones to determine where they are and when (and if) they move into a relevant area, the costs of the campaign would be prohibitive.
What is required is a solution that reduces the load on the network and the cost of delivering location-based applications by providing a notification only when someone moves inside or outside of a relevant area. The notification can then serve an advertisement relevant not only to the subscriber’s location, but based on other factors as mentioned in the AP article such as calling patterns, age and spending habits provided by the mobile operator.
One recent and innovative approach to the location challenge for mobile advertising is zone detection. Zone detection recognises the radio environment at a particular location and then works out if the measurements being made by the mobile phone are consistent with being at that location – all without the need for GPS. It is much like the example of identifying that the customer is at the ticket office of the London Eye, without having to ask them where they are (or if they are in London at all).
In this case the handset is being asked what it can “see” in terms of the radio environment and decides if it can recognise the “landmarks” corresponding to that zone. In a human sense, we are looking to see if we can see the London Eye, and the ticket office – a good indication that we are at the right spot. Therefore a binary decision is made as to whether the user is inside or outside the specified zone, and a targeted message or advertisement can be sent if and only if they are in the zone – much in the same way that Google AdWords only charges the advertiser when the ad is actually clicked. This scenario is what advertisers have wanted all along, but has been too costly and complex to deliver until now.
Article continues at
http://blog.andrewgrill.com/blog/_archives/2007/12/29/3436329.html
as well as more thoughts on mobile advertising, mobile location and local search.
Andrew Grill
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
