Phone Ads with Geolocation
What a truly appalling idea. Sending ads to people’s cellphones when they come near a store, and charging a fee if the person (or at least their phone) enters the store.
Personally, receiving ads on my cellular phone would actually strongly discourage me from buying anything from the ad sponsor. I might, however, go in and out of the store repeatedly, just to make them pay (pun intended).
More than that, this idea has some serious technical problems which I don’t quite see as solvable.
If people receive the ad when they come close to a store, then any person intending in advance to shop there will receive it too. And when they get into the store, the store must then pay for a supposed ad-induced entry… Unlike a web click-through, there’s no good way to separate people that entered because of the ad from people that entered regardless (or despite) of it.
Just brilliant.
The comparison to web advertising would be more like placing an ad at the home page of a site, promoting that selfsame site, and having the owners pay for every viewer of the ad.
Or more realistically (if I must), it’s like tracking who saw an ad, and making a site owner pay when they go there, even if not by a click. Hey, since large ad provider actually track ad viewing today, they could implement it right now. Whenever you see an ad, they can check their cookie to see if you saw a previous ad for the site you’re browsing now. And if so, make the site owner pay. It’s the exact same model. Yet somehow I don’t see people paying for it… So why should it work better with brick-and-mortar?
Paying for anyone who shopped at your place, and who have also seen an ad, is not a good idea. The connection is too tenuous.
Not to mention, since some people are like me in the great love for being spammed with ads on their phone, would the ad service also offer a refund for people getting the ad and not going into the store? After all, the ad sponsor could claim that it was a potential customer who was lost due to the ad… The connection between seeing the ad and not going in, and seeing the ad and going in, is of about the same strength. If you accept one, you should accept the other, no?
Hmmm… This actually could catch up on the web. Anyone buying ads would love to get paid for ads that people saw without ever going into their site afterward. If an ad provider offered this, I’d consider buying ads from them myself…
November 10th, 2004 at 18:23 EET | Categories: Marketing, Web |
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