A recent post on the Mobilists group discussion board was from Lasse Larsen. He wrote to tell us about bipbip.com, which is an interesting mobile service where users sign up for ads, or, perhaps more accurately, tailored product offers. Users enter their product interests, price willingness and location. Advertisers respond accordingly, whenever they can match a user's interest.
Permission based location ads?
Whatever they are and wherever we are in the LBS market and innovation cycle, everyone agrees that location is a unique aspect of the mobile experience. Indeed, this has always been so. By the very nature of using cells in a cellular network, location is inherent in the network. The technical term is mobility management.
Now I kid you not that I believe to be one of the first people to talk about location-based advertising, but perhaps not in the way you expect. I submitted a raft of LBS techniques and architectures for patent filing back in the early 90s, in my days as a chip designer for the insides of GSM systems for Motorola.
One idea, rejected as 'not core business' by the Motorola patent attorneys, but supposedly defensively published in the library of congress, was to attach electronic billboards to base stations (especially microcells that pepper our town centres) and then feeding the right sorts of ads to the billboards depending on who was 'camped on' (i.e. using) that base station.
Many years later I proposed a similar idea, but this time giving each and every billboard a short code to dial so that the advertising companies could gain a direct location-based response to adverts. See an ad, like it, dial the number, get connected. Actually, what I was also proposing at the time was to use short codes to access websites, in order to avoid all that URL-typing nonsense. At the time, I proposed a 'services key' on mobiles so that users knew they were 'dialing an application' rather than a voice number. It seemed a good idea at the time and might have taken off. Who knows where the tipping point lay in any idea?
These days, we could do this, if we wanted to, using SIP-based calling or some other intelligent IP-based connection management scheme. More likely, if SIP never takes off, we will end up using web-based 'dialing' from a link via some kind of landing-page. Perhaps a standard will emerge for this. There have been plenty of proprietary attempts.
One of the unsolved problems with LBS is how to connect users with location opportunities. A user moves around and will have various interests. Opportunities will cover the map, some of which might coincide with user interests. Wherever there is an overlap of interest with opportunity, then this indicates a potential transaction event.
Triggering LBS events
I have always contended that we need hyper-accurate location finding as a precursor to crossing the chasm of consumer-based LBS. It has been interesting, and somewhat tiring, over the years to see how many times various advocates of relatively inaccurate location-finding techniques have argued using 'in the ball park is good enough.'
In some ways, it reminds me of those who have spent years arguing dogmatically that mobile web is better than any native solution, come what may. What they really mean is 'theoretically better,' in the same way that coarse-grain LBS is better, if only it worked as promised, which it often doesn't.
Moving a few years on, our great location-marketing pioneer, Russell Buckley, once posted the question: "what would it take to get users to sign-up for location-based ads?" With his current position at AdMob, I'm guessing that he's still interested in that question. It has caused various debates and controversies along the way, frequently raising a post or two from yours truly.
When Russell first raised the question, my initial response ("Cheap Milk on my Mobile") was to think of the potentially huge long-tail of geo-advertising. I thought of my local shops that invariably through away food if they don't manage to sell it off. I'm not going to take a trip to see what's on the sell-off racks, but what if I could browser the rack on my mobile? Architecturally, I proposed the use of RSS feeds, although there are various other architectural issues to consider, not least of which is still the idea of how (and where) to manage the interest/opportunity filtering.
(By the way, if we could use mobiles like this to reduce waste, I would be happy. It was incredibly inspiring to watching the late Paul MacReady talk about his philosophy of 'do more with less' as a guiding principle for his mission as a plane designer.)
It seems that the use of geo-coded RSS feeds and a means to aggregate them is still emerging. No doubt, Google have their eyes on this potentially lucrative channel of advertising.
Russell's question is what came to mind when I found out about bipbip.com. They will surely have an answer for him before long. But will it be the right one? Will it be good enough to cross the chasm of location-based ads, a nascent industry that has been a long time in the making.
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