Companies constantly
struggle to find the best advertising strategies to promote their
goods and services. They need to be able to reach the segment of
population that is potentially interested in their products. They
need to deliver the advertising in an appropriate manner that will
“stick” in the users’ minds. They need to make
sure that the products and services advertise are those that meet
the user’s needs. And they also need to ensure that their
advertising does not annoy anybody, since that could result in a
negative impact.
To meet these
constraints, companies hire advertising agencies to help plan suitable
advertising strategies. These agencies promote the companies’
products and services through a variety of the means of advertising
that would best reach the target audience and make the greatest
possible impact within the budgetary constraints. Pervasive computing
environments could provide a really powerful platform for these
agencies to advertise their clients’ products and services.
Studies show
that online advertising – banners on websites, popup ads,
email offers and so on – is very effective and provides significant
brand communication power. In fact, the studies indicate that online
advertising dramatically increases product awareness after just
a single exposure. If online advertising can be so effective, ads
in pervasive environments can be even more so. Pervasive ads can
be even more personalized than online ads and they can make use
of various pervasive devices to deliver ads with greater impact.
Just as new display and sound technologies can make a theatre out
of a living room, these technologies can also make ads so much more
appealing.
Advertising
is one of the major sources of revenue for many websites, not to
mention radio stations, TV stations and newspapers. In fact, online
advertising provided a major financial thrust to the explosive growth
of the internet. It is, thus, conceivable that pervasive advertising
could also provide a major financial boost to the development and
deployment of pervasive computing environments. So, a pervasive
computing architecture that aids effective advertising would have
a better chance at succeeding in getting widely deployed. In fact,
advertising alone could pay for the deployment and maintenance of
pervasive environments, and the actual people who use the environment
could get the service free of cost.
Advertising
is different from traditional publish-subscribe systems or notification
services. Notification services are generally userdriven, i.e.,
they allow users to specify various conditions and be notified when
these conditions become true. Advertising, however, does not work
the same way. Although users could subscribe to receive certain
kinds of advertisements (like subscribing for email offers), most
advertisements are not subscribed for. They are pushed by the company
to the user in the hope that the advertisement could kindle a latent
need for the company’s product or service. Serendipity plays
a major role in
advertising - companies hope to entice new consumers into buying
their products even when they are not specifically looking for it.
The advertiser, thus, wants to push as many advertisements as possible
towards the user, though the consumer wants to receive only a few
selected advertisements. There is a tug-of-war between the advertiser’s
interests and the consumer’s interests.
The pervasive
computing environment has to reconcile these two opposing forces.
Pervasive environments are in a good position to selectively deliver
relevant ads to the right set of people at the right time. They
also have a wide range of delivery mechanisms to users like SMS
to cell-phones, email, large displays on walls and audio in rooms.
They can, thus, deliver the ads in a way that would annoy the users
the least while communicating as much information about the product
as possible.
Pervasive computing environments hold great potential for the field
of advertising. This paper describes our vision for pervasive advertising.
We examine some of the possibilities of advertising in pervasive
environments as well as the challenges involved in this area.