Better tracking and metrics will appeal to advertisers

Rating: sliding down the slippery slope of abandoned privacy

By Annie Turner

Start-up Pelago has just raised USD 7.4m from investors including Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon) and investment house KPCB. Why? Because it’s in the process of patenting its Pay-For-Visit Advertising. The technology relies on GPS, Bluetooth or RFID to track where people go and to find out if they visit a store or other kind of business premises in response to a mobile ad received earlier.

To maximise ad revenue, phone calls are also tracked to see if the consumer dials a number associated with an ad while transactions are logged to see if a purchase is made from an advertiser.

Even to those of us in the wacky world of mobile advertising, this sounds a bit Big Brother-ish. No wonder the patent application points out government agencies might also be interested in the technology. But before I got too much on my high horse about this (about the only damn type I ever have the time to ride these days) I reflected that every Underground journey I make in London is tracked because I use a prepay Oyster card to get cheaper fares.

It’s reckoned that in central London everyone is typically being filmed by two or three CCTV cameras at once and now the British Government is about to spend GBP 2bn on a hare-brained identity card scheme, which no doubt will be as splendid a mess as the new passport system in the 1990’s.

Can’t see how ID cards will stop people blowing up the Underground though – after all, the perpetrators were known to the authorities, but it didn’t help on 7th July 2005 when 52 people were murdered and 700 injured in bomb blasts due to poor intelligence. And do you think the armed police officers who killed the innocent Charles de Menezes, then lied about the incident, wouldn’t have gunned him down, but instead asked to see his ID card ? No, me neither.

After all that, tracking ads seems positively innocuous – we’re a long way down the slippery slope of abandoned privacy already.

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5. Pontis’ marketing tool may help mobile advertisers