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FEATURE
Sensing the way to a more personalised future for mobile ads
By Ronan Cremin, CTO at dotMobi
Te mobile device continues to enjoy a meteoric rise, with over 6 billion subscriptions now active across the globe, and alongside it mobile advertising has also come of age, becoming the de facto way for brands to engage consumers through their smartphone or tablet device. Te global mobile advertising spend last year was over $13bn, according to Gartner, and is projected to rise to almost $42bn by 2017. Te importance of advertising on mobile is also highlighted by eMarketer expecting it to account for nearly 25% of the total ad spend this year.
However, advertising has traditionally suffered from the problem of measurability; as famed advertising pioneer John Wanamaker succinctly put it: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Traditional internet advertising relies on two sets of factors to deliver its results: Contextual relevance (content currently being viewed, time of day, offline ad campaigns, etc.) and purchase intent (previous interest in a product, previous purchases or searches, products bought by others with a similar behavioural profile). Mobile offers the opportunity to
extend this targeting capability further, by incorporating information about the user’s device and hints from the user’s context, for example: • Device type: Tis broad device category is a strong indicator in deciding the most appropriate ad to serve to a consumer. A person using a tablet is most likely to be in a sedentary context, whereas a person using a smartphone could be in just about any situation. To illustrate, a smartphone user is less likely to follow- through on the purchase of an item where visualising or inspecting the product is an important factor in their choice, this transaction is more likely to conclude successfully on a desktop or tablet.
• Device model: Device model data can be used in a wide variety of ways from the most simplistic (“Get apps or content for your specific phone model”) to more sophisticated campaigns based on specific device models and propensity
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to perform certain actions (“Upgrade your iPhone 5 to an iPhone 6 today”). Sometimes an advertising campaign can simply be targeted at a hit list of devices that are known to be popular in certain segments of the population. For example, targeting affluent users might focus on recent high-end devices only.
• Device properties: Tese are a key source of data for many advertisers in order to better target the right content to the right people, with some of the most important areas including: Screen dimensions (ensuring that ads are sized appropriately for each device), device operating system (ensuring relevant links to the web or app stores are correct), HTML5 support (used to determine the richness of experience that should be served to a given device) and network protocols supported (if a device only supports GPRS it should be served an experience that works well at this speed).
• Device location: One of the holy grails of mobile advertising is the ability to actually know where in the world your potential customer is. Location- specific targeting opens up an entire new range of possibilities that weren’t really available with desktop and laptop devices. Tis opens up the possibility of hyper-local targeting, such as advertising to people within a city block or short drive of a certain store.
• Other mobile sensors: Arguably most excitingly, most smartphones now include an accelerometer and compass, as well
as a host of other sensors being added (such as the heart beat monitor in the Samsung Galaxy S5). Tese sensors allow an advertiser to know precisely which way a device is pointing and its orientation; the latter can be used to infer information about the physical context. To illustrate, if the device is perfectly horizontal it’s probably sitting on a table, which means the user is not out and about; if the device is tilted to 120 degrees from horizontal the user is probably lying down. Te accelerometers can also be used to determine if the user is on the move or not.
As connected devices embed themselves ever deeper in our lives, the importance of device and contextual information will increase. Tose that succeed will need to be able to distinguish themselves by their ability to target and engage customers successfully across the varied landscape of mobile devices, contexts and use cases. All indications are that the exploding
device diversity that we have witnessed over the past decade or so is set to continue, if not accelerate. Tis will also create waves of diversity between mobile devices, which is already partially underway with the growth in wearable devices (smartwatches, fitness/health trackers and head-mounted devices). Tis means more channels available to mobile advertisers and additional targeting opportunities. With the additional information the sensors in these devices offer, truly personalised ads on your mobile is not as far in the future as some might think.
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