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| Smartphones could soon reveal a person's every move, writes Julian Lee. |
IN the not-too-distant future, advertisers will no longer have to ask - they will know. When you will have to refuel on the Pacific Highway. That you like lite milk at home but soy in your coffee at the cafe you frequent on the way to work. That your favourite restaurant is the Indonesian around the corner from where you live, and that you are in the market for a leather sofa.
If a single company or service knew all this you might have cause for concern or celebration, depending
on how much you value your privacy.If you do value it, it might be time to ditch your mobile phone. If you don't, prepare yourself for an era of heightened mobile advertising.
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For the mobile phone is fast becoming the up-close-and-personal marketing medium. The power of knowing what you want and where to find you is indisputable.
The ability to combine a person's location at any given time with which websites or mobile applications they have visited on their smartphone's browser is opening a new world of possibilities for marketers.
Within the next year, half the mobile phones in use will be smartphones such as Apple's iPhone or Samsung's Galaxy, embedded with technology that can pinpoint your position to within a metre.
Within three years the number of internet searches made through mobile phones will outstrip those via computers. Google has found that when a person gets a smartphone, the number of searches they make increases fiftyfold.
Google and Facebook are putting location at the centre of their businesses. Both have launched services that broadcast your location to friends - Latitude and Places respectively - and within weeks Facebook will allow participating retail outlets, restaurants and cafes to offer special deals to Facebook users who ''check in'' with them. Greater rewards are on offer to those who bring their friends. Searching for stuff on mobile phones is already a $US1 billion business for Google and demand by advertisers to have the number of their nearest outlet listed next to their Google ad is one of the fastest-growing areas of its business.
The director of mobile advertising at Google, Michael Slinger, says: ''Location will be one of the cornerstones of mobile advertising. Merging local businesses with mobile [advertising] is very, very important for us.''
Such technology allows advertisers to target people at the ''moment of truth'', the point at which someone decides to make a purchase. Graham Christie, the commercial director of the mobile marketing agency Big Mobile, says people should be pleased rather than perturbed at the prospect. Why? Because such pinpoint targeting will eradicate bad, and irrelevant advertising.
''We can give people more of what they want, when they want it and less of what they don't want,'' he says. ''It takes the guesswork out of a lot of advertising.''
Christie is studying traffic patterns in Sydney to develop a mobile application to alert commuters to deals they can find on the way home. If he can match that to data on what we search for or buy, that information is very valuable to advertisers who want to reach people on the move.
Add to that a service that logs your buying history and the ability to pay for items merely by swiping your phone at the checkout and the possibilities are endless, says a mobile apps developer, Jamie Conyngham. He predicts that a single service acting as an aggregator of people's browsing or buying history will be operating before long. The theory is that it can sell those audiences to advertisers based on their behaviour and location.
A new generation of phones - Google's Nexus and the iPhone5 - will be capable of acting as mobile wallets and are due to be released this year. MasterCard and Visa have also run trials of such swipe-and-pay systems in Australia.
Behavioural targeting, the technique of grouping people according to their browsing behaviour, is already an established practice on the internet. The user's identity is never revealed and the segments of consumers are sold to advertisers who match their needs with their marketing messages. Only now the layer of proximity through mobile phones is added.
This way, says Conyngham, companies can alert people to deals when they are in the vicinity. ''If you can get very specific about their tastes you can really tailor discounts to them or up-sell them something, or work out what it is that they might want that they didn't know they needed yet.''
With the help of technology, the art of using location to map where people are and predict what they might want - often called ''predictive intelligence'' - is fast becoming a science. If it is a hot day and you have just alighted from the train, maybe a two-for-one slushie deal as you move through the concourse could be just the ticket? But what if you are not into slushies but smoothies? The only way the marketers will know is if you tell them.
The job of the marketers is to make it easy. ''If you look at the internet and mobile phones, it's really only the simple things that work,'' says Conyngham, who runs Viva La Mobile. ''When Amazon reduced the number of clicks it took to buy a book or a DVD, they saw their business grow. Mobile needs to be even easier than that."
Text messaging and buying ringtones worked because it was easy. Bluetooth technology - an open wireless technology used to exchange data over a short distance and once held up as the answer to geo-targeting - didn't because it took the user three or more steps to log in.
Others are predicting more subtle uses for geo-location. Nic Hodges, the head of innovation at the media agency Mediacom, ran a promotion for a sparkling wine brand that ''hosted'' its own network at the Melbourne Cup last year. It worked on wireless technology and enabled racegoers who joined for the day to find one another in the crowd, the nearest bar or bathroom.
''Geo-location has got to be more than just providing cheap coffee to the world,'' says Hodges. ''I think if it's coming from a brand then it has to be providing a useful service or some form of entertainment that hooks into that social scene.''
If a study released last week is any indication, it appears we can't wait for the plethora of services that are just waiting to spring up. Australians are the most comfortable with mobile advertising of any country, it says. Three-quarters of those surveyed said they were either ''very comfortable'' or ''somewhat comfortable'' with mobile advertising, the study by InMobi and comScore found.
If geo-location marketing does take off, privacy experts such as Colin Jacobs of Electronic Frontiers Australia say, inevitably, people will compromise their privacy.
Businesses are now required to ask mobile phones if they will consent to their ''current location'' being used. That acceptance gives the company permission to track you and serve messages, some of which may be from third parties. In the eyes of the law, you are now in a business "relationship".
Given that many phones are always on and constantly transmitting the position of the user, Jacobs says it is easy for advertisers - and others - to develop a pattern of someone's whereabouts. ''It wouldn't take long to work out where you are and where you live. I'm not suggesting that someone is going to fire a missile at your house but finding out where you live is very sensitive information to be handled by third parties. I think we'd better get used to living in an age of less privacy.''
Privacy is coming increasingly under the watchful eye of lawmakers. A Senate committee is investigating online privacy and privacy laws are under review.
Google and Facebook say they make it easy for users to adjust privacy settings and to opt out of location-based services but the spectre of Big Brother still looms large. Jacobs says some of the responsibility rests with us and, if people are uncomfortable with the idea of being tracked and targeted, they must learn to resist the instant gratification that a smart phone promises them.
"But in the end it's a bit like telling someone who is going skydiving to be careful. There is only so much warning you can give them."
