Editor's Note: This blog post originally appeared on the Optism blog, a home for engagement marketing. You can follow Optism on Twitter (@optismww) and sign up here for the latest news.
Hulu, the U.S. online video service announced a stream of changes to its offering a few days back. Our favorite was the ‘Ad Tailor’. As Hulu puts it, "The goal of Ad Tailor is to increase the relevance of ads for our viewers." It’s very simple. When a viewer watches a program on Hulu, during the ad break, the user is asked how relevant the ad was to them. This helps Hulu overtime to display more relevant ads to that viewer.
The advertising industry is so often caught up in clever technology that involves complex behavioral or contextual algorithms that they forget that ‘users’ are actually ‘humans’. What better way to find out what is relevant than to ask?
Between the
Mobile Advertising U.K. research project and interviews for
MSG's own global mobile advertising reference work (more about that in future posts), I'm naturally eager to connect with the companies and the brands that set the bar. (If you have a story you would like me to consider for the projects I mentioned, or you just want to share your news with the growing MSG community of mobile operators, influencers, senior executives, and decision-makers, I encourage you to contact me directly or email my PA Andrea Henninge to set up a briefing (
andrea@msearchgroove.com).
A company that has caught my attention, with a potentially path-breaking approach to location-based advertising, is
BipBip, the brainchild of
Lasse Larsen, Chairman of the Board, WIS International. (Wireless Information Services). The company - headquartered in Riga, Latvia - has an impressive stockpile of patents around the service, and ambitious plans to launch BipBip worldwide (including the U.S., China, India and 21 cities across Europe) following a successful pilot in Denmark last month.
(My personal thanks to Lasse for contacting me on Twitter (@peggyanne) and for giving MSG the exclusive.)
What is BipBip? On paper the ad-funded service fulfills the criteria mobile advertising evangelists
Andrew Grill and
Jonathan MacDonald would no doubt agree are essential to delivering effective advertising services.
I'm thinking here of the 3Ps: Permission (people will decide what brand messages they interact with); Privacy (people will decide where their data is collected and how it is used); and Preference (people will decide what content they find relevant).
But the real differentiator is an
even cleverer feature that turns greed-is-good bargain hunting into a mission to make the world a better place.
April 17, 2009
Tags: BipBip, location, Location-based services, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Advertising U.K., permission-based
Posted in Local Search, Location-based services, Mobile Advertising, Personalization, Recommendation | 10 Comments »
