Welcome to the world of inference advertising, which relies on targeted ads that use your smartphone’s geo-location and social history to serve relevant mobile ads that know what you want, even before you do.
Predictive ads — tailored to your exact location and taste — may sound intrusive, but the idea is to cater to your preferences rather than to spy on you, says Bill Gross, the CEO of UberMedia and founder of the startup incubator Idealab.
“What we’re trying to do is change advertising from intrusive to invited,” Gross says. “The whole focus of UberMedia is to show the right ad at the right time, to the right person.”
A recent campaign for Nike’s new Carmelo Anthony shoe, for example, targeted those who followed New York Knicks players on Twitter or whose smartphones were GPS-tracked on hiking trails, running trails or tennis courts within the last month. When users in Manhattan were within 100 steps of a Foot Locker or Nike store, a shoe-shaped ad directed them to nearest locations of both of those stores.
Ads are served in approximately 100 apps, including some Tribune properties like the L.A. Times’ app. The Nike campaign ran in Echofon for iPhone, UberSocial for iPhone and Android and Plume for Android.
The service uses your phone’s geo-location and data from your social sites, building trackable data points of taste and patterns. The ads are served throughout the day in 15-minute intervals so companies can pick what times to best target customers.
UberMedia analyzed the top 100 auto malls, sports arenas and movie theater complexes in the United States, outlining the individual stores and brands within each location.
“If you actually draw the boundary of a car dealership, and draw the boundary of each brand within [an] auto mall, we know that people in this boundary right here were looking at a Honda,” Gross says.
The company, which is only three years old, appears to be producing results. Gross says his tactics achieve a click-through rate between 5 and 10%, 10 to 20 times more effective than average rates. UberMedia takes a flat rate of 30% off of ad sales.
Gross sold his bid-based pay-per-click company Goto.com for $1.6 billion to Yahoo in 2003. Now, he says he wants to do for mobile what he did for online search: bring value and relevance to audiences and profit to advertisers.
Yet concerns about privacy persist. “UberMedia has a responsibility to users to ensure big brother is not watching over them every single step of the way,” says Raoul Marinescu, a digital sales manager for CBS Television.
Gross claims to be aware of these worries, which is why the service is opt-in. Users who don’t want to be followed can turn it off in their phone’s settings or email UberMedia. No third-party information is sold and tracking is anonymous, meaning it’s only seen by the algorithm to fulfill ads.
“Not only do we not do it because we don’t want to bother anyone, but [privacy invasion has] no benefit to us,” Gross says.
What do you think of predictive ads? Do they creep you out, or do you think it’s the next wave of advertising? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Image: Blakespot; screenshots courtesy of UberMedia
Source : Mashable
