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U.K. Ad Display Monitors Frequency by Bluetooth

A new advertising display in the school of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton University in the U.K. monitors Bluetooth wireless transmitters in the vicinity and displays ads most relevant to those consumers.

The display detects the presence of Bluetooth cell phones and PDAs; software agents then bid against each other to determine which ads will be shown, writes New Scientist Tech. The screen, 58 centimeters wide, displays a mix of ads about upcoming seminars, items of interest from the University’s website and video streams of lectures within the department. As the individual device is recognized, the screen builds a record of the ads people have seen previously, so that the messages are not repeated too often.

When multiple people are in front of the screen, the system “chooses” the material seen by as few of the current audience as possible. Software agents, each with fixed advertising budgets, bid against each other depending on the number of new exposures the ad is likely to get, while the agent with the highest bid wins.

While the system is currently limited by the fact that the Bluetooth device has a range of only about 10 meters, and that the devices must have their Bluetooth functionality switched on, there are future possibilities. Users could, for example, add profile information that would allow the display to offer more personalized ads.

Advertisers are perhaps just beginning to tap into the possibilities available with Bluetooth wireless technology. As they do, privacy concerns may begin to be a bigger problem, in part because consumers do not necessarily know what their Bluetooth devices are capable of.

Bluetooth technology has three states: off, open to communicate with devices they’ve been paired with, and “fully discoverable.” Marketers have been taking the third option to mean consumers are open to marketing, but users may not know these options are available or what they mean.