What's faux-Swedish for "goofy advertising ploy"?
Recently spotted in my neighborhood: bus shelter ads for IKEA.
At the bottom, there's a lovely footnote that instructs folks to "turn on your Bluetooth" for directions to the nearest Ikea store. I had seen this ad for a couple weeks before I bothered to try it out ... and Sunday afternoon was the moment of truth. It took a couple minutes of fiddling with my phone (Treo 700p) to get the Bluetooth function turned on, and then to leave it visible, and eventually a message popped up. "Would you like to accept IKEA-CollegePark.GIF into your device?" Setting aside my fear of viruses, I accepted the file and then opened it.
It's the first time I've encountered what is likely to be a growing trend, similar to the complex 2-d bar codes I previously wrote about ... but there are a few troubling elements here. For starters, I'm not sure that there are enough people (at least not in the US) who both know how to use Bluetooth and are willing to have their phones loaded down with this kind of content.
Second, the process is not anywhere near quick or impulsive. I had to wait a good 30 seconds after turning on my Bluetooth to receive the signal and then accept the file. Average phone users likely haven't turned on Bluetooth for anything other than their headsets and won't understand how to do file transfers. Unless I were actually waiting for the bus, I wouldn't have stopped for 2-3 minutes to fiddle with my phone to make this happen.
Third is the quality of the received ad itself -- and this is really a comment on IKEA's ad agency, not the technology behind it. I realize the content should be simple and relatively small for the average mobile device ... but this ad (A) looks terrible, (B) is misspelled, and (c) offers woefully inadequate directions.
At the bottom, there's a lovely footnote that instructs folks to "turn on your Bluetooth" for directions to the nearest Ikea store. I had seen this ad for a couple weeks before I bothered to try it out ... and Sunday afternoon was the moment of truth. It took a couple minutes of fiddling with my phone (Treo 700p) to get the Bluetooth function turned on, and then to leave it visible, and eventually a message popped up. "Would you like to accept IKEA-CollegePark.GIF into your device?" Setting aside my fear of viruses, I accepted the file and then opened it.It's the first time I've encountered what is likely to be a growing trend, similar to the complex 2-d bar codes I previously wrote about ... but there are a few troubling elements here. For starters, I'm not sure that there are enough people (at least not in the US) who both know how to use Bluetooth and are willing to have their phones loaded down with this kind of content. Second, the process is not anywhere near quick or impulsive. I had to wait a good 30 seconds after turning on my Bluetooth to receive the signal and then accept the file. Average phone users likely haven't turned on Bluetooth for anything other than their headsets and won't understand how to do file transfers. Unless I were actually waiting for the bus, I wouldn't have stopped for 2-3 minutes to fiddle with my phone to make this happen.
Third is the quality of the received ad itself -- and this is really a comment on IKEA's ad agency, not the technology behind it. I realize the content should be simple and relatively small for the average mobile device ... but this ad (A) looks terrible, (B) is misspelled, and (c) offers woefully inadequate directions.
So, what's next for this wave of advertising? Sadly, I see a decent amount of bad (hackers sending junk files when one is expecting a legitimate ad), a whole lot of disappointing (continued ineffectual spots like this one), and ultimately the ugly, a "Minority Report" kind of world where advertising is completely immersive, adaptive, and inescapable. The open question is whether Bluetooth is the right transmission mechanism ... just wait until GPS and 4G wireless technologies team up to start driving some kind of high-speed wireless ad delivery.
Leave a comment