Beaming ads to your cellphone

Ignoring advertising will get increasingly difficult with billboards now being able to beam video advertisements directly to passing cellphones.

People walking past these billboards will receive a message on their phone asking them if they wish to accept the advert. If they say 'Yes', they can receive movies, animations, music or still images further promoting the advertised product.

For instance, at a recent Idea Cellular event with singer, Sunidhi Chauhan, in Pune, the telecom company used bluetooth technology to offer free downloading of content like song clips and pictures through the use of bluecasting technology as a part of its outdoor campaign to promote the event.

Idea had put up four Bluecast servers inside different malls and multiplexes in the city with posters asking the customers to switch on their bluetooth devices in the premises to receive free Sunidhi Chauhan memorabilia, thus creating a buzz for the upcoming event.

Another BlueCasting campaign in the past was done by Lee Jeans in Bangalore and Mumbai and was targeted at customers entering high-end malls. It received around 20,000 downloads in one month.

The conversion rate was good with over 28 per cent of people accepting the Lee content and interacting with the brand (either by downloading wallpaper, collection catalogue and TVC), according to Nilesh Kale, director of the Pune-based firm, One-to-One Technologies, which claims to be the sole provider for BlueCasting services on the French Kameleon MobiZone technology platform in India.

The company is in talks with various advertising agencies for a nationwide rollout of Bluecast servers behind billboards that would deliver personalised content to people.

"We are looking at volumes and expect to install close to 100 sites in the next 3 -6 months and up to 400 servers in the coming year, thus accounting for five per cent of the total out door media spend," says Kale.

With close to 160 million mobile handsets and nearly six million handsets being added every month, Bluetooth-enabled handsets account for 25-30 per cent or 45-50 million handsets.

R Lakshminarayanan, chief executive officer, Mudra Marketing Services says, "Outdoor advertising is a Rs 1,500-2,000 crore industry growing at 15-20 per cent per annum. In the next three years, new media will contribute 10-15 per cent of the total outdoor media spends."

A bigger question in all likelihood is how companies will persuade users to accept the adverts once the novelty has worn-off. "If we can provide exclusive or valuable content to consumers, they'll actively want to consume it," says Lakshminarayana while stressing the future of outdoor advertising is in conveying information and content that consumers would be seeking.

Besides unlike spam, these promotions will have something to offer, Kale claims, such as content or vouchers.

Kale is mulling on introducing more interactive retail and outdoor solutions involving, kiosks, convergence of 3D barcodes or Radio Frequecy Identification (RFID) with mobile phones and other such technologies.

It's only going to get more difficult to ignore adverts in the days to come and it might not be that bad considering they shift from push to pull.

DEMYSTIFYING BLUECASTING

BlueCasting is proximity-based marketing. The BlueCasting system identifies each consumer's bluetooth-enabled (bluetooth is a technology that lets your computer, monitor, mouse, keyboard, PDA "� in fact anything with a Bluetooth chip "� communicate by radio instead of cables) handset and delivers a tailored message to them. It can deliver content up to 10 times faster than downloading it via a mobile network. And since the content is delivered direct from system there are no network charges for the brand or the consumer.