OnMobile 2011: Targeting location to deliver smarter ads

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>> The historical example that everybody always talks about is somebody's walking down the street, you walk by a Starbucks and you get a Inaudible message, or you get a beep on your phone and it says here's a coupon to go buy a cup of coffee. Do you think that's a little too early? Or do you think Speaking Simultaneously --

>> No. Well, the irony is --

>> -- more?

>> So the irony is that we're running that program today in the UK. Right. Starbucks is using the program to introduce their via instant coffee product. You get an offer for a single serving with a discounted coupon at the store and then you get a different offer for a multi-pack purchase. There are geo-fences around grocery stores. And so there's a storyboarding element to it. But one of the interesting things that we saw -- we do a lot of research as part of every program we do. The prevailing view is that consumers are going to get that message, walk in the store, and about 20 percent of the time, consumers that buy actually do that, but it's usually for impulse purchase types of items. And more frequently, consumers that buy will do so a couple of hours, even a couple of days later. If you think about your own user experience, you're on your way to work or you're on your way to a meeting, and you get a message. You log the location. You say this is a great offer. When I'm coming back tonight, I'm going to make time to stop in. And that's much more the prevailing view or much more what's actually happening, which is sort of flying in the face of the prevailing view. I get a coupon. I walk in the store. I make a purchase.

>> Yeah. And I think the first version of ad networks and companies that were created in the online world were about categorizing publishers and making, you know, putting them in categories so that advertisers could buy against that. And then sort of a parallel set of companies emerged on the DSP side, that really started to participate more on the exchanges, but utilize data and targeting is really the primary mechanism to really bring relevance for the advertiser to target consumers. Are you seeing -- are you able to put some of those technologies to work as well, like data and targeting? And what are maybe some of the key parameters that you folks are important for delivering the right kinds of campaigns to the consumers?

>> I think for a lot of us in the industry one of our ultimate goals is being able to provide and bring advertising to an end user so that it's not seen as advertising. Make it so relevant that it's much more seen as useful information. Yeah. And when I heard is, you know, if I walk by a Starbucks and then my phone beeps, I just start -- good that I can turn off my phone. Yeah.

>> Yeah. Oh, no.

>> Yeah. So I think if we drive it forward and have a good opt in mechanisms. Yeah. There were a lot of issues now about privacy, using location and Inaudible, which often is much more the question of intransparency.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. So if we make it transparent enough to the end-user, then they will see a value in that and will support it. And they understand, here's free content and it's ad supported and it's not to offend him. It's much more building a healthy ecosystem where everyone actually can benefit from.

>> Yeah.

>> So ideally, all of us are also consumers, and we get advertising when we want them about things we like. Yeah. And at the same time, it allows our advertisers to actually find us, yeah, and being able to address us with useful information and being able to facilitate this matchmaking.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. I was going to say, I think the ad industry itself is driving a lot of the targeting that all of us is doing. You know, clearly, since the time of Memorial, advertisers have been buying things like age, gender, and product categories, in particular places that they wanted to reach people. And we're kind of replicating pieces of that but then adding in the unique features that mobile can bring to it, which is, you know, in our own case, we've always had a hypothesis that you actually need to lead with location in mobile because where someone is and when they're there actually turns out to be highly predictive of the kinds of things that they might be interested in. Right. Two PM on a Tuesday in the financial district of a big major city is kind of one set of attributes that are very different from that same person at 10 PM on a Saturday night in the mission. They're interested in different things. The kinds of things that they want to do on their phone and connect with are very different. And so that location context actually provides a lot of rich new information for advertisers to take advantage of, in addition to layering on all the kinds of things that they've done in the past, age and gender, and categories, and things like that.

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