I recently had a great phone interview with Gregor Isbister, Managing Director of breezeTECH. breezeTECH is a mobile advertising company that specialises in proximity and bluetooth marketing. I had written a particularly scathing article about a T-Mobile bluetooth mobile advertising campaign, and Greg wanted to defend his chosen channel. He explained that proximity marketing CAN be very effective – but only if it’s deployed in a very specific set of circumstances.
First off, it’s important not to exaggerate the capabilities of bluetooth – it’s not a “magic box” that makes everyone within 100 feet get your message. You have to be realistic about the technology. There are many problems that immediately arise. Biggest of all is the fact only roughly 10% of people actually walk around with their bluetooth turned on. After that, there’s the problem of notifications – the vast majority of phones have NO ALERTS for incoming bluetooth messages. All that happens is the backlight turns on. A user would actually have to be holding their phone and looking at it to see that something has made contact. And if, after all that, someone did get the message they would almost certainly refuse it – because they have no idea where it has come from, and would treat it as a security risk.
Breezetech has found you need three key things to make a proximity campaign work:
1) A very clear contact: you need to erect posters or signage explaining that there is a bluetooth campaign in the area, and telling the user what the content is. You have to let people know it’s there, and let them know WHAT it is. Not only does that let people know it’s not a security risk, it also gives that 90% of people who don’t normally have bluetooth turned on a chance to receive the message.
2) The content has to be good: since you’re actually asking someone to stop and take time out of their day to access your content, the content had better be valuable. No one will bother turning on their bluetooth and interacting with your campaign unless the content is relevant and decent quality.
3) Have a “dwell” area – run your campaign in an area where people will naturally be staying around for a while. For example, the departure board at a train station or airport, where people will be hanging around anyway. This gives them the time they need to decide whether or not they want to accept your campaign. If you just pepper people as they walk along the street, they are unlikely to stop and consider your offer.
These three factors, combined, should give you a large enough number of interested people to make your bluetooth campaign worthwhile.
One of the reasons that many people are disparaging about bluetooth campaigns is because of the number of “cowboys” in the market who oversell it’s capabilities. To help counteract this, breezeTECH is one of a number of companies working with the MMA to put together a set of guidelines for proximity marketing. The MMA is currently revising the guidelines, and is expected to release them the first half of this year.
What we think?
Ok, so I was a bit harsh on proximity marketing. It can be made effective, and it can be made non-intrusive. In fact, from what Greg says, it’s pretty hard to make it intrusive. Indeed, if you have to erect all of the signage anyway you could just as easily save a bit of cash and make it a shortcode-based SMS campaign. The benefit of bluetooth is that you can move richer multimedia content to the users phone more quickly than you could by SMS – but is the expense of the initial set-up worth it? It would depend on a case-by-case basis and on the choices of the advetisers, but ultimately I’m still not convinced of the long term chances for bluetooth marketing.
Hats off to you for listening and rethinking your judgments about Bluetooth marketing. We have run many effective campaigns utilizing this technology and look forward to the healthy growth of this niche assuming other Bluetooth marketers are utilizing the necessary components you highlighted above.
Here in the UK the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) have published guidelines relating to Bluetooth Marketing which show that it is possible to produce a proximity marketing campaign that is both successful and ethical. The trick is to provide relevant content to consumers that have already declared an interest in the product or service that is being promoted.
We have just introduced our first Bluetooth Kiosks which require interaction from the consumer to request the downloadable content via a touchscreen before it is sent to their specific handset.
Initial result have been promising with demand from corporate clients already outstripping our ability to supply these bespoke systems. There is no doubt that consumers are keen to utilize Bluetooth Technology as long as the content that they are being offered is of interest and of genuine value. Several MEPs are using Bluetooth Broadcasting in their campaigns for the upcoming European Elections and have been receiving email and telephone responses from young voters that have traditionally shown little interest in politics. Having been contacted via their mobile phones many more young people are communicating with their representatives for the first time.
Another prominent campaign in the UK developed by Fantastic Media Ltd.has offered free MP3 files to audiences at music venues with royalties paid to the bands by the event organisers for every download. This extra revenue helps to perpetuate the music industry and is a welcome source of income for lesser known musicians. The future of Bluetooth marketing depends on the ability of the providers to offer good quality content only to those that welcome it. Our biggest UK Network has almost 150 sites in London with a variety of advertisers offering content at different times. Each site is clearly labelled as a Bluetooth Hotspot and advertisers are vetted to ensure that genuine promotional offers are being presented. Each mobile device has a unique MAC address and our campaign reports show that the same devices are regularly receiving new content from the same HotSpots. We welcome the involvement of the DMA and fully support the introduction of their new guidelines that encourage Bluetooth Marketers to show restraint with their campaigns and make the technology more acceptable when used for marketing
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It seems there are two misstatements.
1. “only roughly 10% of people actually walk around with their bluetooth turned on”
First, it’s more, for instance on airports over 30%. But mainly, it doesn’t matter at all how many people have BT *already* turned on. Targeting people without their concent would be spam anyway. BT success depends much more on cleverness and arrangement of classical p.o.s media. The challenge is *to make them turn BT on*.
2. “the vast majority of phones have no alerts for incoming bluetooth messages.”
That’s not right, most phones beep or display a message. But again – the mission is NOT to make every phone nearby ring without their owners being aware of the p.o.s. media. It’s about to g i v e t h e m a r e a s o n to turn BT on and download something.
BT is not a push channel. People choose their media because of benefits. So don’t tell your customer a primary school would be the right location to campaign for life insurances or dentures just because many pupils have BT turned on… that’s the typical bullshit of proximity oversellers.
Btw, I would even say that two-thirds of all proximity companies are crappy spammers and totally unsound. This is maybe the biggest problem of this industry.