iSign Media links flat-panel message displays to consumers’ wireless phones
Derrick Penner
Sun
William Urrea, iSign Media’s vice-president of business opportunities, shows a flat-panel display ad in a store viewed on a cellphone. Urrea calls it ‘consumer-permitted advertising.’ Photograph by : Ian Smith, Vancouver Sun
The next time you’re walking down Robson Street and your phone rings, don’t assume it’s a friend calling.
In shades of the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report, it could be the Bluetooth-enabled advertising display in the shop or bistro you’ve just passed recognizing your Bluetooth wireless phone and beaming you a message: Would like to receive an advertising offer?
You then have take a couple of seconds to decide whether you think it is mobile spam to delete, or a cool new way for businesses to tell you about deals.
Vancouver-based iSign Media is betting it will be the latter. iSign sells the advertising system, called Bluetooth proximity messaging, as an add-on to the flat-panel advertising displays it has around the city.
It is “the final frontier for advertising,” William Urrea, iSign’s vice-president of business opportunities, said in an interview.
The company is sensitive to the possible perception of the advertising messages as just more spam, so it is working on making sure they are attractive incentives rather than generic promotions.
“It’s consumer-permitted advertising,” Urrea said. “Whatever it is, we want to make sure it’s an actual invitation to participate in something,” whether it is a coupon, a discount or some other giveaway.”
One of its restaurant clients, for instance, offers a free plate of chicken wings if the recipient shows their server the ad.
However, if the person being buzzed with the message declines it, Urrea said the system won’t send that ad to him again, and all the ad boards in its networks will not send other messages for a prescribed period of days, or weeks.
“We’re tweaking the system,” Urrea said.
And when a recipient accepts an ad, they won’t receive the same one again, nor will the same board send another ad message from its rotating roster of ads for an hour or two if the person stays in the same location.
Urrea added that in acknowledgment of privacy concerns, the system doesn’t collect personal information such as your name or phone number. It does, however, record the phone’s identification number to build a profile of the user.
The 19-month-old iSign has 25 of its ad display panels in Vancouver, 15 in Calgary and plans to put up 300 more across the country.
However, the question is whether iSign’s messages can break through the virtual blizzard of ad messages that fly around consumers every day, according to Tom Shepansky, a partner in the Vancouver advertising firm Rethink.
“It is literally thousands [of messages],” Shepansky said. “What are you going to remember? A handful, at best.”
However, Shepansky added that the move towards putting content on mobile devices, the so-called “third screen” following television and computers, is evolving into another medium to which advertising must adapt.
Still, Shepansky said it is a case of “more isn’t better.” However, if iSign can deliver more customized and targeted ads, “maybe it’s better. You would have to test drive it.”
iSign president and chairman Alex Romanov said the technology does build profiles of which ads phones accept, and which they reject. That tells advertisers which promotions are effective.
He added that young people, in particular, are getting more used to communicating and doing business with cellphones.
“In Germany and Japan, people use cellphones to pay bills and shop,” Romanov said, and the potential audience for its ads is growing.
Romanov said company research tells them that there are more than 13 million cellphones in Canada, and 2.5 billion worldwide, with the number that are Bluetooth-enabled rising every year.
Urrea added that if people keep the Bluetooth option on their phones turned off, they’ll never receive ads.
