Digital Media Buzz > Mobile advertising: Personalizing content for a greater payoff

Mobile advertising: Personalizing content for a greater payoff

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Types of mobile ad
Surveys show that Internet users consider relevant advertising as valuable content. And more types and strategies of advertising are available on mobile devices than on the fixed-computer web. These include:

• SMS: Short text messages, often in the form of alerts or updates (news, sports, special offers) from publishers or advertisers.
• MMS: Multimedia messages, which have been, to date, the most widespread and successful type of mobile advertising.
• Banners: Top of page, bottom of page
• In-content: Advertising within applications, such as games, or as per-rolls for videos
• Interstitials: Blocks or screens appearing while an application or other content is loading
• Branded content: Such as a game or other application, branded by a sponsor. Nokia, for example, offers quizzes, such as MTV’s celebrity quiz.
• Downloads: Such as wallpapers, themes, ringtones and ringbacks.
• Click-to-call: The user already has the phone in hand — all they have to do is click to call the advertiser.
• Click-for-coupon: Upon clicking, the user receives a coupon, with a scannable bar code or an alphanumeric code, depending on the vendor’s scanning ability. Coupon prompt might be targeted by geo-targeting.
• Text response: American Idol has racked up nearly 700 million text messages, as viewers vote for their favorites. And it makes money off each vote. Users are normally offered a short 4-6 character code for texting. This feature has been used in politics and other types of campaigns.
• Viral media: A compelling advertisement or video that pushes a user to pass it on to other users.

Privacy speed-bumps
But the very things that make mobile targeting so potentially powerful are also in the cross-hairs of privacy groups and federal regulators.

The key attribute highlighted by Google manager Sumit Agarwal — the highly personal nature of a mobile device — is something critics want left private.

There are technical hurdles to using key web behavioral tools on mobile devices. Specifically the use of cookies and web beacons to track users’ habits over time and across sites isn’t available in most cases.

But an immense amount of information about mobile users is stored and tracked, and that’s what has privacy advocate worried. Your mobile carrier, who is also most likely your portal to the Internet, knows a lot about you—- your credit card number, your credit report, your address and phone number, perhaps the number of family members.

Your carrier also tracks everything you do with your mobile device, for billing purposes. It tracks your location, where calls or other transactions were made, your messaging, the telephone numbers of your friends and everyone else you speak to. It knows how often you called an oncologist. It knows what you’ve uploaded and downloaded, and was likely the conduit for both transfers. Cell phone records are often used by law enforcement in criminal prosecutions, to establish contacts, travel, etc. In some countries, such as Japan, cell phones are normally used to pay bills and make purchases. All this data is held by your permission, courtesy of your service agreement with your wireless provider.

This information is clearly sensitive — classified as personally identifiable information (PII) — and the fallout would be horrific if the wireless providers shared it with anyone. But using that information to help target advertising for a third party becomes a bit murky.

That’s the sort of question addressed recently as the FTC raised questions about deep-packet sniffing by Internet service providers AT&T and Verizon, in the context of behavioral targeting on the Internet. Both companies rejected the idea of monitoring their customers’ web habits, even in a non-personally identifiable way.

But as wireless providers, these companies and others track such information as a matter of business agreement. In April, the FTC, which had already delivered a set of guidelines on behavioral targeting on the web, released a new report, “Beyond Voice: Mapping the Mobile Marketplace.” This report was the culmination of a series of nine sessions started in 2008, based on questions of wireless operator practices and mobile privacy raised by advocacy groups. At the end, the FTC staff’s main recommendation on mobile specifically, is that the industry continues to battle mobile spam and the development of spyware or malware.

Other issues were addressed in the February FTC staff report, “Self-Regulatory Principles For Online Behavioral Advertising,” which went out of its way to include emerging mobile advertising practices in its overall recommendations for online marketing.

The use of geographical location in targeting individual mobile customers is a gray area, especially since the user often authorizes its use to help customize his or her online experience.

Google raised a privacy flap earlier this year when it unveiled a new service called Google Latitude. This application allows you to share your exact location — via GPS and cell connection — with your friends, or even the public. For example, Google offers a widget that can be inserted into any web page that shows the user photo pinned to a map showing exactly where he (or his cell phone) is at any given time. Google built in multiple layers of safeguards, from clear, interstitial warnings to urging the users to enable emails alerting them regularly that they were being tracked.

Privacy advocates themselves caught heat for objecting to the feature on principle. Latitude followed best practices on educating the user, warning about making information public, offering controls as to who could see the information, and reminding users regularly that their locations were being broadcast.

Google did make one change in the wake of protests, however, changing the feature so that it overwrites the previous location with every update, as opposed to storing a history of locations.

As in the general Internet world, industry groups are scrambling to head off federal constraints through self-regulation. For nearly a decade, the Internet industry overall has been careful to observe privacy policies and self-regulatory standards. The goal of every industry group is to avoid offending users, as well as the specter of a new layer of regulations.

A major concern is the visibility of privacy policies and opt-in/opt-out features. These notices are already under scrutiny for their relative lack of visibility and intimidating legalese on full-sized web pages. The tiny screen of a web-enabled smart phone provides very little room to make such alerts visible.

This awareness has led the G1 Android phone, for example to take extreme measures to ensure that users are informed and agree to the use of personal data. Before the download and installation of any mobile apps, the user is informed, via a full-screen interstitial, exactly what personal data will be accessed by the application, such as the user’s live location.

The Mobile Marketing Association has issued detailed guidelines, covering everything from deceptive practices to positive user experiences.

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