om Cruise fans will recall the classic scene in Ste-
ven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller “Minority Report”
when lead character John Anderton walks through
a shopping mall and a barrage of interactive, three-
dimensional LED displays recognize and target him with per-
sonalized advertisements for Lexus, Guinness and American
Express. When the movie was released in 2002, the notion of
intelligent, individualized marketing seemed like a figment
of Hollywood. Today, that scene is an uncanny glimpse of a
future not too far from what mobile marketing technology —
especially utilizing the booming smartphone market — has
already achieved.
iSign Media, headquartered in Toronto, describes
itself as a pioneer in interactive Bluetooth marketing. Its
kiosks deliver marketing messages to Bluetooth-enabled
mobile devices anywhere from three to 300 feet away.
Unsolicited prompts are delivered to users who opt in to
view the ad. Privacy issues are tempered by the fact that
these Bluetooth prompts use a smartphone’s unique address to deliver the message for free, not the user’s phone
number or email address.
“With each message, they can choose to ignore, ac-
cept or decline the ad, giving them the flexibility to
control who, when and how they receive messages,” says
Alex Romanov, iSign Media president and CEO. “After
making a selection, our system can capture the response
and logs it for future analysis.”
Consumers specify the types of products they like
and enroll in loyalty programs with preferred retailers to
customize the ads they receive. “If the consumer becomes
a loyalty member to that store, ads can be customized
to their shopping needs,” says Romanov. “Logic can be
put into place to build profiles and have ads aligning to
these profiles, such as sporting goods, makeup, etc. If a
phone user accepts more ads that fit a given profile, then
ads within this profile can be targeted to that individual
phone user.”
iSign has received more than 2,500 orders for software
licenses, and half will be integrated into kiosks owned by
partners, including IBM, BlueStar and AOpen. There’s a
pilot project currently running in Hawaii as the company
plans to introduce Bluetooth marketing to several (undis-
closed) U.S. cities in the near future.
Continued >
It’s Beginning to Look A Lot Like Mobile
The 2010 holiday season may finally put an end to the
debate over whether mobile marketing has arrived. According to the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA),
59 percent of mobile users surveyed said they would use
their mobile phone for holiday shopping. Several of the
nation’s largest retailers, including Target and JCPenney,
sent special offers and mobile coupons to their customers,
and the National Retail Federation (NRF) cited mobile
shopping as one of the top 10 holiday trends of the year.
