Will location-based mobile advertising take off?
CBS Mobile have announced the first US trial of location-based advertising to mobiles, in partnership with Loopt, the friend tracking and networking site. The service will be opt-in and the ads will arrive at CBS web sites on subscribers’ phones. Having worked on ‘future concepts’ of this kind some years ago (with the luxury of not having to join up the underlying technology, nor worry about the protection of individuals’ privacy) it will be interesting to see the service develop. (In fact the concept I worked on was peer-to-peer, rather than advertiser-to-consumer: a sort of location based Gumtree, where individuals could advertise rooms to let, yoga classes, lost cats etc. And I’m sure such a mobile service will emerge sooner or later.)
I wonder how many people will opt in to the CBS Mobile service and, once in, will use their web sites often enough to get the benefits of the advertising. It will, of course, depend on what the deal is and whether the content is enticing. With the delivery format as described, it’s likely to be a service people with conventional cell phones use when they have some down-time ‘let’s see if there’s anything interesting near here’ rather than always on. How many times would you go through the process of accessing a web site and finding nothing relevant to you before you stopped altogether? Still it’s early days and I’m sure this is nothing CBS Mobile and Loopt haven’t thought of.
If the location-based element is combined with personal profiling the service could be powerful, e.g. just as I’m going into a bookshop to buy a birthday present for someone, I’m notified that there’s a sale on all SciFi (having previously listed SciFi in a profile of my reading). Anecdotally it seems there might be broadly two sorts of response to this kind of prompt: some would welcome it (just as they welcome Amazon recommendations ‘those who bought this, also bought…’); and some would dislike the intrusion (and probably wouldn’t sign up to the service anyway). In any case, the combination of location and personalisation might be too ‘micro-personalised’ for advertisers who may want to prompt more serendipitous buying. And (although it’s hard to tell from the available information) that sort of personalisation may not be possible with the current CBS Mobile plan, where advertising is to be delivered anonymously.
Now that mobile advertising is up and running in several different implementations it will take some time before effective delivery formats bed down i.e. until users vote with their feet about what is acceptable and what isn’t. And my suspicion is that it might be quicker on mobiles than on traditional internet (i.e. via computers), where many companies continue to use advertising practices that frustrate users (despite the admonishments of usability guru, Jacob Nielsen). With mobile phones, however, there’s less space and, in most, less processing power to play with, plus a sensitivity to cost that is largely absent from computer use. Indeed the whole context for use differs dramatically from the computer. So people’s acceptance of formats that don’t suit their actual use of the phone may be limited.
So much of acceptance depends on the right implementation for the device being used and the context of use, as a quote from John Strand, attending this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, highlights
“One thing is to come out with an announcement. The next is to deliver. At the end of the day, the user decides who is the winner and who is the loser. The winner is the one who can give the best experience.”
Thanks to Richard Linington for pointing out the CBS Mobile/Loopt announcement.
2 comments February 12th, 2008