Long Range Bluetooth Marketing

May 27, 2009 by 13 Comments

longlHave you ever come across a specialist ‘Long Range Bluetooth Marketing’ provider, who can deliver advertising content to consumers’ mobile phones who are 100m, 500m or even 1km away from the transmitter?

As Head of Technology at Hypertag, I am intrigued to know whether this technology can actually work. At Hypertag we spend our time developing proximity marketing solutions where we endeavour to limit Bluetooth range to clearly branded zones so the consumer is fully aware they will receive branded content, rather than sending unsolicited content to unknowing consumers. When this happens, we are all affected as it gives our industry a bad name by tainting us with an image of spamming.

In my experience of developing Proximity Marketing solutions, there must be huge technical challenges to providing a long range Bluetooth Marketing solutions.

In the first instance, let’s take 100m Bluetooth Marketing, now any Class 1 Bluetooth device will report being able to send data over 100m, great you say, here’s a Class 1 Bluetooth Access Server ( Class 1 = 100mW, Class 2 = 2.5mW, Class 3, 1mW ) so I can do 100m Bluetooth Marketing. The big issue here is that the majority of mobile phones have Class 2 (10m) radios to reduce the phone cost and besides who needs more than 10m Bluetooth range on their phone? The net effect of this for a Proximity Marketing solution is that you’ll be lucky to achieve 30m range in practice.

So we now have a standard Class 1 Access Server and know we can only actually achieve ranges of 30m, but for my particular application that’s ok. Next question is; how many mobile phones will be within range of my Access Server? Considering it will be able to see mobile phones within a 30m radius, I would imagine in a typical football stadium (a location much loved by the Long Range Bluetooth Marketeer!) this will be in the order of 100′s of mobile phones.

Now my big question is; how could any Bluetooth Access Server reliably send content to all these mobile phones? Bluetooth’s original purpose was really to connect hands-free headsets to mobile phones and for connecting computer peripherals to PCs, neither of which are anywhere near as demanding as connecting to 100′s of mobile phones reliably. Bluetooth technology only allows 7 simultaneous connections to be made concurrently. Its download data rates are relatively low and experience shows to expect these to be significantly reduced when a large number of Bluetooth devices are in close proximity interfering with each other.

At Hypertag we have optimised our solutions to download content efficiently in high load environments by using multiple Bluetooth radios, while reducing the range of transmission so our downloads are targeted and keeping the content size to a sensible maximum. The majority of our campaigns will operate at less than 5m range with great results and without upsetting the other mobile phone users further away. I suspect that any solution that attempts to broadcast advertising content using Bluetooth over a wide area will suffer reliability problems and great consumer dissatisfaction. This dissatisfaction will also extend to brand running the campaign.

In summary if your brand or agency is considering using ‘Long Range Bluetooth Marketing’ I would strongly advise considering a managed ‘Proximity Marketing’ solution with managed range contol as the only way to advertise your brand reliably and in a non-intrusive way.

Graham Tricker

Filed under Bluetooth Technology

Why you should use a quality Bluetooth marketing provider? (Part 1)

May 24, 2009 by 2 Comments

nokia1I would like to take head on a question I am asked or overhear being asked nearly every week:

“I want to do Bluetooth  Marketing but why do I need someone like Hypertag when there are budget Bluetooth Marketing providers out there offering systems for as little as £75 ($100) ?”

I would advise you to always use a quality provider and I have summarised what I see as some of the key reasons:

Strong technical benefits

There are many technical reasons why quality Bluetooth marketing solutions who make significant investments in software development, provide better performance; here are just a couple of examples.

a. reliable simultaneous content download to several phones

If you have Bluetooth on your computer, it’s not that difficult to work out how to send an image from the computer to a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone. Frankly that’s the easy bit. If all you want to be able to do was that, then you would never need a Bluetooth Marketing provider in the first place. Budget providers only offer systems that work on the same basis.

Budget Bluetooth systems typically use only one Bluetooth transmitter. This works acceptably in a situation where you only have a low number of phones near a single Bluetooth system, but breaks down the minute you have many Bluetooth enabled phones in the vicinity. In most Bluetooth Marketing situations, it will be the case that many Bluetooth phones will be in the area and it is likely that many consumers will want to download content at the same time.

Hypertag uses multiple Bluetooth transceivers and antennae and uses sophisticated company-developed software that works out the optimum use of the transceiver to offer consumers the best experience without waiting for an existing download to complete. A simple computer equipped with a Bluetooth dongle can’t offer anything like the same experience.

b. reliable back-end networking

Budget providers often offer network-connected Bluetooth content servers that use a simple USB modem to manage the Bluetooth marketing system. If you have ever used this type of phone with a laptop, you are sure to be aware that an occasional crash occurs. The same will happen with a budget Bluetooth content server. Hypertag uses special modems and GPRS data network suppliers that are designed for 24/7 operation as having poor backhaul will often require the expense of a physical service visit – which will almost certainly blow your campaign budget!

1.    Priority on download

This capability creates clear blue water between Hypertag and other quality providers – not just budget providers. Most Bluetooth content servers prioritise ‘pick up’, which means people receive the messages offering them the content download on their phone quickly but then they have to wait longer for the download. This is because the phone is so busy sending those initial messages to every phone in the vicinity that they do not have the time to do the download!

Hypertag uniquely prioritises download. We send the pick up message and then immediately ensure that the mobile phone has received the requested content before we move onto pick up another phone. This means people who receive the download message receive their content as quickly as possible. Through years of experience, we have found that this gives the best experience for consumers and leads to higher download levels.

Unfortunately, campaigns using budget Bluetooth marketing providers, will see lots of people being alerted in their campaigns, but few people will be able to download the content in a reasonable timeframe. They will just run out of patience and walk away very unhappy. This is not a good use of campaign budgets.

More phones will be compatible with the Bluetooth content server.

To work well, a Bluetooth content server needs a database of all mobile phones in current use. This is because every model of mobile phone has different capabilities in terms of what content can be shown and the aspect ratios and sizes of their screens. Before any content can be downloaded, the phone’s display capabilities needs to be identified.

Our phone database, which has over 1,500 different phones, is growing all the time. It’s kept up to date with new phones as they come onto the market. For budget providers, the costs of keeping such a database up to date are just too great. Furthermore, if you haven’t been keeping the phone database up to date over a period of time, it’s very hard to go back and provide support for phones that aren’t sold anymore.

One challenge is that Bluetooth content servers can’t recognise the exact model from the phone’s Bluetooth signature. All quality providers have to use a way of determining  what model is requesting the download from information that is available. Hypertag calls this the phone’s ‘fingerprint’. To do this well, you have to have a very large fingerprint database and some clever software to work out which fingerprint is which phone and put its information together with that you have in your phone database.

To make this task really challenging, two completely different phones can fingerprint the same way. To uniquely identify a phone reliably, so that the vast majority of users receive the right content for their phone, you need some serious technical investment. It’s very unlikely that a budget provider will have any capability approaching this in their system.

Only experienced Bluetooth marketing providers have the means and the ability to implement these types of systems and keep them up to date.

In part 2, we will look at some more reasons why it is best to work with quality Bluetooth marketing providers.

Jonathan Morgan.

Filed under Bluetooth Marketing, Bluetooth Marketing Campaigns

Bluetooth marketing and Bluetooth in-car hands free

May 12, 2009 by 2 Comments

fiestaWhen I read many of the blogs that talk about Bluetooth or Proximity Marketing (BPM), it’s often stated that the concept is ‘edgy’ and is pushing the boundaries of innovative ways to actively engage with consumers. How could anyone disagree!

However, although BPM is now widely used as an extension to conventional passive advertising campaigns by big brands, it is still early days. BPM has been around as long as Bluetooth standards have existed so it can never be said that the growth rate of Bluetooth marketing has been stellar when compared to some services.  On consideration, there are several reasons as to why this might be so.

If we go along with this thought for a moment, to my mind  one of the principle reasons for this is to do with Bluetooth and it’s use on mobile phones.  Specifically, most mobile phone users have Bluetooth permanently turned off! This does seem a little strange  when you consider that one of principle uses of Bluetooth was to enable hands-free usage of mobile phones. This not only helped with usability but also provided a solution to possibility of RF radiation creating health problems.  This, at one time, seemed very compelling reasons for mobile phone users to use Bluetooth – but strangely it just didn’t happen.

This makes the offering a service that actually relies on consumers having Bluetooth turned on on their phones rather problematical one would think!? The problem was that having Bluetooth turned on had real negative impact on battery life. Moreover, there was much publicity about the potential problem of Bluejacking which turned out to be relatively harmless concern.

Having Bluetooth turned off is not such a major concern for BPM as there is usually a local ‘call to action’ asking consumers to turn on their mobile phone Bluetooth with the incentive of downloading goodies as they pass. This concept works pretty well in practice. However a real reason and need that pushes consumers to have Bluetooth permanently turned on on their mobile phones could have a major positive impact on the BPM industry. In my opinion, has been missing to date, but it could be that this is all about to change.

Secretly creeping up on us is the concept of  integrated Bluetooth hands free operation in cars. This is concerned with Bluetooth controlled hands-free telephone and voice control systems in cars. You may say “so what?” as the concept has been around for some time in the form of retro-fit kits and built into the platform of top-end cars. However, these Bluetooth based systems have now moved from the fringe to the core.

With strong legislation about the use of mobile phones in cars, car manufacturers have been busy incorporating Bluetooth capability into the heart of the telematics  (communication platform ) of cars, rather than being just being an after-market accessory. The concept is now so key to the control on in-car items such as  phones and audio, that it now being made available even on bottom of the range cars. By way of example, it is even available on the popular and low-cost Ford Fiesta !

Clearly, with wide-scale and availability and use of Bluetooth as a key element in hands free use of mobiles in cars, then car-driving consumers will always leave Bluetooth permanently switched on on their mobile phones. This could could have a positive impact on the download uptake and success experienced with BPM campaigns – especially at motor shows! Moreover, it opens a whole new array of applications but more on this later.

Photo credit: Fiesta Bluetooth hands-free telephone and voice control system, Ford UK

Chris Gare

Filed under All, Bluetooth Marketing, Bluetooth Technology

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