More location awareness related advertising stuff...

More location awareness related advertising stuff... I put some slides up related to the location awareness opportunity for advertisers.

We're certainly not there yet, but some potentially interesting implication for where this could go in the future.

Summary is:
- GPS and location awareness in mobile devices is growing like a weed across a variety of devices - e911, 3G data, PNDs all contributing to bringing this to mass market
- location awareness anywhere and everywhere (ie not just where GPS works) is a key to consumer success
- all the big players are investing big NOW (Google, Nokia, Yahoo, Microsoft, Garmin, TomTom)
- web world was just warm up for mobile in terms of size and opportunity, and location awareness is key driver
- relevance (targeting) and time appropriateness is a key benefit and driver of the advertsing opportunity
- ad targeting is important key driver of revenue for existing web players (Google makes $12+ per average monthly unique, while MySpace makes $1.32)
- behavioral targeting, ROI metrics and search all get one step better with mobile location awareness
- privacy is a huge issue, but web cookies also once seen in a similar light



Continue...

Making Up Stuff About Yahoo Fire Eagle

Yahoo announced the arrival of its FireEagle location brokering product last Wednesday. What the heck is it you may ask? Well, straight from the source… according to Yahoo it “is the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online. We want to make the whole web respond to where you are, and to help you discover more about the world around you.”

Ok. Well to start from the beginning. Yahoo wants to be the broker for your online location information. So what does that mean exactly? Well just like other types of brokers: stock broker, real estate broker, mortgage broker, and insurance brokers…. They want to help mediate the exchange between a buyer and seller of something of value. In this case, the thing of value is information related to where you are on this lovely planet.

So to be clear, there is currently no money directly exchanging hands and so far, the broker is doing his brokering for free.

So let’s think about why someone would want to buy and sell such a thing and why Yahoo would want to step into become the broker. So what do the buyer and seller in this brokerage relationship get out of it?

Buyers (websites, application developers) get relatively turnkey access to better information that makes their service more convenient and valuable. Nearly everyone who offers an online or mobile application would like to be able to easily know and use their customers’ location and integrate it into the features of the application. Granted it’s more important to some than others, but the need is widespread across a variety of applications for anything from letting you know the weather forecast or showing only relevant apartment listings, or showing pages in the correct local language. Heck if local governments takes a fancy to this, you might see them trying to collect different taxes based on where the user was when a transaction was consummated. Woo Hoo! Don’t worry, that ain’t happening anytime soon.

Sellers, (ie you the consumer), get the convenience of not having to explicitly tell every site or application you come across, your location information and you get to decide what to share or not share each time. Remember the eWallet phenomenon from the late ‘90s? The eWallet was going to save everyone the hassle of having to re enter their personal and financial information and the eWallet was the gatekeeper to your wallet online. In many ways Fire Eagle is a cross between the location equivalent of the eWallet and a cross site/device “smart cookie” that knows and holds your location information and just shares the detail that you want shared and only with “approved” sites.

Last but not least, assuming it’s not out of pure benevolence, what does Yahoo get out of this whole thing?

Well the answer is probably not that simple and straightforward, but I’ll hazard a point of view on where you could take this: Yahoo’s business is primarily selling advertising. And forget about amassing more and more page views as a strategy, the absolutely massive supply of potential impressions on the web means that only a very small fraction of those impressions ever get monetized. Instead, the name of the game is to have the high valued stuff that advertisers want.

So the next logical question is, well what kind of stuff do advertisers want? Well it can generally be broken into two parts…

1. Mass concentration of eyeballs in a single place. Think of the price premium advertisers place on an ad on a hot primetime program versus the equivalent number of eyeballs pieced together from running 100 spots at 3am

2. Targeting. The degree of match or correlation between the advertisers product and the reason the online impression was generated… ie there are billions of page views being generate out there on arcane scientific matters, oceanic current, Chinese consumer electronic company balance sheets, etc, etc that advertisers want absolutely nothing to do with

So here are some leading businesses who make their money from online advertising, and the stuff they provide that advertisers want:

• Google: just amazingly good at targeting/filtering, effective revenue per thousand is off the charts relative to anyone else. They could directly monetize the mass concentration aspect as well, but so far have chosen not to.

• Yahoo: both large aggregator of eyeballs for premium display ad business and also big player in search

• AOL: was once the largest aggregator of all Internet eyeballs, but is now forced to be an aggregator of large broad verticals of consumer friendly eyeballs (family, finance, entertainment type stuff). They also leverage their size by double-dipping and renting targeted search from Google.

So going back to Fire Eagle. By knowing people’s location information and matching that information with knowable information about the world around those people, the opportunity exists to target like never before. To date, targeting has been one dimensional from the point of view that it has been limited to indexing information from web pages and only reflects the view as seen from the time a user spends in front of a web browser.

If you look at how quickly mobile location awareness technology is proliferating into everyday consumer devices like cell phones, there is no reason to expect that everything that is currently done in the world of web based targeting won’t be stretched, linked and recreated into the ‘real world’ with mobile location aware devices at the foundation.

Let’s take a look at the way a few things work in the web world and see how they may translated into the mobile location awareness world:

Everything from PageRank to click through rates and behavioral targeting, could be recreated, through a widely available mass market location awareness program. So in theory this could be the foundation of what FireEagle is all about.

Continue...

Cost Per LoV: More on LBS Advertising

There is an interesting interview with Peter Friedland an equity analyst with the Soleil Group on GPS Business News. He predicts that besides navigation, that mobile search and mobile social networking will be the next two big areas of growth in LBS with a particular emphasis on search via cell phone and “connected” PNDs. Now it’s not much of a stretch to see the existing search advertising leaders get into paid listings, with a new data point, location, available to them to help target ads. In other words, instead of searching on a web site for “sweater” and having a link to the EddieBauer.com website come up, you’d search for “sweater” on your phone and have the nearest Eddie Bauer retail store location pop up on your phone along with turn by turn directions to get there.

This alone will certainly open up new categories of local ad dollars from neighborhood pizza joint and nail salons that aren’t currently big AdSense advertisers. But what is even more interesting is that location awareness can get the big national advertisers one step closer to what every ad buyer ultimately wants, which is to completely close the loop on measuring how and if ad dollars are working to accomplish their desired goal of more sales.

Granted location awareness can’t tell you if a consumer that saw your ad bought the advertised product, but it can take a giant step in that direction by measuring whether someone who saw your ad actually went to the place you told them, like your retail store location. A big reason for the success of online media has always been its accountability and measurability, when compared to traditional media. So if there is a way to make this palatable to the consumer, you can be sure that it won’t be too long before we have another new media term to add to CPC (cost per click) and CPA (cost per acquisition) … look out for the cost per LoV, (Location Visit).


Continue...

This Map of the Deep South Brought to you by Moon Pies

You may not have yet heard of the term Mapvertising, but Lat49 hopes to change that soon enough. Lat49, a division of Canadian based IDELIX is trying to create an online map based advertising network, where the world will be sold off to sponsorship one parcel at a time.

Advertisers with a strong affinity for a geographic area can bid on plots of land to sponsor… any one of four zoom levels: street, neighborhood, urban area or brand (state/nation level) which can means sponsoring anywhere from four city blocks to half of a state.

A single tile is currently being offered for $1 a month, but will soon open up to the good ol’ free markets auction system for any parcels that haven’t previously been squatted upon… er spoken for.

The ads will appear on the maps of any publisher that has chosen to use the system and uses any of the major online mapping providers including MapQuest, Google Maps, Microsoft Live Search, and Yahoo! Local.

The whole set up seems a reasonable extension of what has worked well enough for all the premium display advertising networks out there such as advertising.com, Burst Media, etc… which proved that servicing hundreds of thousands of small publishers who are creating niche content destinations with little or no means to make money from them is a potentially lucrative business.

With the burgeoning popularity of online mapping, the creation of an online map network was an inevitable extension.

I can already picture it “This Map of Alaska brought to you by Burlington Coat Factory” or the deep south brought to you by MoonPie. The possibilities are endless.

Continue...

Wi-Fi Coupon and Ad Delivery: Beacon Stuffing

Back in the mid 90s there was this company WavePhore that was trying to bypass the very slow connections that folks were experiencing on the internet by pushing content down over the television broadcast signal using a section of the signal called the vertical blanking interval (VBI) reserved by the government for communicating those emergency broadcast system test… you know the ones with that had that annoying squeal followed by the ‘This has been a test of the emergency broadcast system, this is only a test, if this were a real emergency….”.

Well the company didn’t make it, for a variety of reasons that I won’t get in to, but it looks like Microsoft is channeling WavePhore ghosts in some research they’re conducting into a similar concept concerning delivering location relevant ads over Wi-Fi Networks. For those with hard core interests their paper makes for an interesting read, but for everyone else it essentially goes something like this:

Many Wi-Fi networks (if set up to do so, and most are) are constantly emitting beacons essentially saying ‘I am here” to allow potential users to find and connect. Whether or not you connect to the network or not the beacon from all networks in range will continually announce their presence and wireless (Wi-Fi) devices will always receive this announcement. The range for these beacons is limited to 100-200 meters so if you know the location of the thing transmitting, then you know the location of any recipient within that radius.

So what could happen is that simple ad messages or coupons (text, audio) could be ‘stuffed’ into this beacon and PUSHED out to any Wi-Fi enabled device within range. Some benefits of this approach are that it is device independent, doesn’t require an actual connection to be made, and is location relevant without being aware of specific device location, a nice privacy benefit.

Continue...

Atoms + Bits: How Location Awareness Will Change Search Advertising

Searching for things, not information about things.

Not that long ago there were just a few television stations or newspapers that everyone watched and read and advertisers would reach huge masses of people without regards to their suitability or interest. This shotgun, mass media for the masses, led to massive waste. As Wannamaker’s famous quip puts it “I know half my advertising budget is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.”


As media became more fragmented, appealing to niche interests and demographics, advertising fragmented along with it, continually gravitating toward content with the best contextual match for their brands and products.

Search engines moved this whole evolution into high gear by providing the ability to target ads in maximum context, not only to a vertical category of interest, but down to the level of a single search query, with an audience of one.

While better context alone has been a huge improvement for advertisers, the search engines’ combination of maximum context with the predisposition of users actively in search mode has proven to be the killer combination that is revolutionize advertising.

This high level of context combined with high engagement has allowed search companies to price on performance, which has been the linchpin of their success. This has proven to be such an incredibly lucrative combination that Google alone is now worth more than the leading old media companies of Disney, Time Warner and Viacom combined.

The most important contributors to the search success: 1. Maximum Context and 2. Right Timing

Location Awareness is The Next Step: Atoms + Bits

For all their successes, web search engines are currently still largely confined to the world of data on web-servers, connecting atoms to bits (you to information), not atoms to atoms (you to other people and stuff), at least not directly. Discovering a profile or description in a database can sometimes be the end goal, but very often the true end goal, particularly in mobile environments is to connect to some THING that exists in the real world, not information about that thing. Either to buy it, experience it, or hook up with it.

Location awareness will add a new and very significant dimension to the search business. As access to the Internet becomes ubiquitous, the location and circumstance under which a search is conducted could dramatically change the results sought. In the real world, people move around, as do the things that they may be interested in searching for. Items in one location will have a different context than if they were in another location and physical proximity will play an important role in determine if the timing is indeed right.

Mobile search users aren’t likely to be researching book reports… so understanding that the needs in the mobile circumstance may be different will be key. Search needs to develop to the point where searching for ‘bathroom’, ‘bus’ or ‘coffee’ on a mobile device can mean finding the nearest one of those THINGS in the world around you.

Take for example the man standing in the rain at bus stop in New York City. Opening up his mobile browser and searching for the term ‘bus’ today will get him the Greyhound corporate website, the city bus service in Hawaii, the Los Angeles county MTA, and two Wikipedia entries as the top five listings. Even if it did return a NYC transit based website, all you’re likely to get there is corporate information and timetables. Certainly this would be better than nothing, but still far short of what he really wants to know which is where is his bus!

Major developments needed to take place in order to take this next step in search services, specifically gaining situational knowledge and awareness, or the context in which the search is being done. Much of this context can be inferred from specific location cues, is the user at a bus stop, or in a baseball stadium or away from familiar territory?

Someone will also need to better attach bits to atoms and know the location of those atoms. Portable mini data storage that can communicate information about itself and its location out to the web will need to come into more widespread use to give web server like information that can be attached or associated with real life stuff, and its whereabouts factored into the search equation.

As the volume and usefulness of the underlying data expands, so too will the number of search queries… and we all know what that will mean for the bottom line of the search engine that enable it.

Continue...