Wireless advertising
Technology has led to new market opportunities and increased competition. In such an environment, the idea to supply potential customers with precise and personalised information in close proximity to the point of sale has been considered very appealing. Location-based services (LBS) exploit knowledge about where an information device user is geographically located. Similarly, Location Based Advertising (LBA) is a new type of wireless marketing, through which consumers, can be reached via mobile phones or PDAs (personal digital assistants). In the scope of project ELBA (European Location Based Advertising) project, three different scenarios were planned and implemented, with the aim to develop and validate an innovative approach for location-based advertising. In one scenario, a customer is passively or actively located and messages containing demand-orientated and highly tailored information are being sent to him. The received information is based on customer's personal profile data stored in a database. The main challenge, which was to analyse the customers positioning information, led to the concept of the so called Assisted GPS, a combined solution of the classical positioning in mobile networks and the positioning via GPS. A-GPS (Assisted GPS) will increase the possibilities of mobile service offers to users eliminating ambiguous interpretations concerning their position. Another method for pushing personalised messages to the potential customers, as advertisements or other desired information was based on the exploitation of the Bluetooth capabilities. This offers the possibility to realize positioning on a micro-level (e.g. within a shopping street or a mall) respectively to the identification of nearby customers. With the implementation of a newly developed system, the identification of user within a radius of 20 metres to the installed facility has been achieved. Based on the stored personal profile the customer was then supplied with the desired information via SMS. The trial carried out in the context of ELBA project opened new trails in wireless marketing allowing advertising in a more targeted way than traditional media channels. The experiences and results gained from initial demonstrations are now waiting to be seized by other companies with similar demands and interests.
