• In the future most mobile devices will be
capable of presenting multimedia-content, e.g. little
images, movies or music sequences. This is
important if logos and jingles associated with a
certain brand have to be presented.
• The emerging mobile networks of the third
generation (e.g. UMTS) will provide enormous
bandwidths, so that until nowadays unthinkable
mobile services will be possible.
However there are also some serious challenges
to mention when talking about mobile advertising:
• Because of the permanently increasing
portion of spam-mail on the internet — statistics
state values far beyond 50 % (MessageLabs, 2004)
— there is the concern of this trend spilling over to
mobile networks. A survey recently conducted “[…]
indicates that more than 8 in 10 mobile phone users
surveyed have received unsolicited messages and are
more likely to change their operator than their
mobile number to fight the problem […]”
(International Telecommunication Union, 2005).
Spam-messages in mobile networks are a much
more critical problem, since mobile terminals have
relatively limited resources (bandwidth, memory for
storage of messages, computation power).
• The user of a mobile advertising application
will only provide personal data (e.g. age, marital
status, fields of interest) if data protection is
warranted. Especially when location based services
are able to track the position of users this causes
concerns about privacy (Barkhuss & Dey, 2003).
• Usability: Because of their small size mobile
terminals have a limited user interface, like small
displays or no full-blown keyboard. Thus a mobile
application should demand as few user entries as
possible. But the small display can be also
considered as advantage: only the text of the
advertisement will be displayed, nothing else will
distract the user.
• Expenses of mobile data transmission: today
the usage of mobile data communication is still very
expensive (e.g. about one Euro for 1 Mbyte data
traffic when using GPRS or UMTS, 0.20 Euro for
sending a SMS or 0.40 Euro for a MMS). This
hinders many people from using mobile devices for
internet research on products and services. Again
nobody wants to pay for advertisement, so the
advertiser should pay for the data transportation.
Within the project „Mobile Marketing (MoMa)“
we developed a system for mobile advertising which
takes all of the mentioned problems into account and
makes highly personalized advertising possible
while guaranteeing data protection.
The rest of this article is organized as follows:
the second chapter deals with related work. In
chapter three we describe the functionality,
architecture and business model of the MoMa-
system. Afterwards we discuss the different types of
context information in chapter four, before a
summary in the last chapter is given.
2 RELATED WORK
1.1 2.1 Mobile Advertising
The high potential of mobile advertising along with
its specific opportunities and challenges is widely
accepted in literature, see Barnes (2002), Tähtinen &
Salo (2004) or Yunos, Gao & Shim (2003) for
example. The latter article also discusses the
business models for mobile advertising by vendors
like Vindigo, SkyGo and AvantGo.
Today’s most common form of mobile
advertising is the delivery of ads via SMS (Barwise
& Strong, 2002), e.g. misteradgood.com by
MindMatics. SMS is very popular – in Germany
approximately 20 billion SMS were sent in 2003
(RegTP, 2003) – but the length of the text is limited
to 160 characters and images can’t be shown, so it
shouldn’t be the only used channel in a marketing
campaign (Dickinger et al., 2004).
Other more academic approaches for mobile
advertising are the distribution of advertisement
using multi-hop ad-hoc networks (Straub &
Heinemann, 2004, Ratsimor, 2003) or location
aware advertising using Bluetooth positioning (Aalto
et al, 2004). There is also the idea of advertising
using wearable computing (Randell & Muller,
2000).
Some systems even provide a monetary incentive
to the consumers for receiving advertisement like the
above mentioned misteradgood or the one described
by de Reyck & Degraeve (2003).
A very important concept in mobile advertising
due to the experience with spam-e-mails is
permission marketing (Godin, 1999): consumers will
only receive ads after they have explicitly opted-in
and they can opt-out anytime. Because a consumer
has to know a firm before he can opt-in it might be
necessary to advertise for a mobile advertising
campaign, see the three case studies in Bauer et al.
(2005) for example.
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