Have 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
June 1, 2009 at 4:02 pm |
Hi Graham,
RE: “In my experience of developing Proximity Marketing solutions, there must be huge technical challenges to providing a long range Bluetooth Marketing solutions.”
Have you considered such products as AirCable’s Server XR? These products enable relatively long range proximity marketing solutions while still maintaining the benefits of shorter-range solutions. Like yours, they use multi-radio approaches.
I agree with your conclusion:
“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.”
The key is in the management of the content delivery to the user. Any solution that does not take into account the user’s desire to receive or not to receive the content at-hand, is doomed to long-term failure.
June 9, 2009 at 2:32 pm |
Hi Peter
Our hardware platform has the option to add external antenna, even with internal antenna we can achieve 30m range with the majority of mobile phones. We however have not used our long range option, as in our experience the consumer experience is severely reduced due to the additional load excerpted on a relatively low bandwidth technology. If using long range settings I would expect the consumer’s experience to be bad as firstly they are likely to be spammed as they won’t see a call to action, then they may not even get offered content or get offered content but the connection fails mid transfer due to excessive load.
June 9, 2009 at 3:20 pm |
Hi Graham,
I can appreciate your position on this. Depending on the solution used, if you do not use a dedicated long-range radio to send content such phenomena (as dropped content) are likely.
In our experience, you need to use the appropriate levels of prioritization for content delivery. Those who have accepted the content get priority over processes like scanning for new customers.
Also – if you use a single radio to do all of your communication, you are likely to run into issues such as this.
As for communicating the message to the customer, our experience is that communicating a message is all about smart messaging around the proximity marketing campaign vs. solely what is included in the text/graphic.
I encourage you to sign-up to our (free) newsletter at http://www.thequalityfactory.com. We run a column on Proximity Marketing in the newsletter you may find interesting.
Thanks,
Peter
June 9, 2009 at 3:44 pm |
Hi Peter
Firstly in reply, yes we have an optimised algorithm for prioritizing content delivery to the people who want to interact with the campaigns we run. Also all our products are multi radio, any solution using a single radio will not work effectively when simultaniously sending content to multiple consumers.
It sounds as though you have a fully functional solution for ‘Long Range Bluetooth’ deployments, do you have any commercial installations? As per my original post “As Head of Technology at Hypertag, I am intrigued to know whether this technology can actually work.” so would love to see this in action and working in real world scenarios.
Thanks,
Graham
June 9, 2009 at 5:27 pm |
Hi Graham,
I applaud you that you are using the multi-radio solution for your campaigns. This is critical for success.
Yes – we have a fully functional solution for long-range deployments. The solution is available through the WirelessCables website (www.aircable.net) and is based-on our OpenProximity platform.
If you would like to learn more, feel free to contact me directly.
Thanks,
Peter
June 9, 2009 at 7:22 pm |
Hi Peter
Sorry wasn’t very clear, I’m more interested in seeing a real world marketing campaign that is already up and running and working well.
I notice on your website you promote ‘Long-range Marketing’ with Stadiums being an ideal location. I agree if this type of Bluetooth marketing works this is a great place to deploy it, we have customers who would very much like to do this, we however use our technology more tactically using our Wearable Product http://www.hypertag.com/products/wearable-hypertag/
to work the crowds on a much reduced range.
Is your kit installed in any stadiums? I would be very interested to see it in action and working well.
Thanks,
Graham
June 9, 2009 at 7:40 pm |
Hi Graham,
The OpenProximity servers are installed in numerous places worldwide today (you will need to ask AirCable more about the exact locations as they are installed with AirCable’s customers).
We (The Quality Factory) provide support to AirCable customers and others who desire to implement proximity marketing solutions and also are actively involved in improving the OpenProximity software.
I would be glad to speak with you more about this offline.
Thanks,
Peter
November 11, 2009 at 6:57 pm |
We had pretty poor results until we connected an external antenna to our BT Booster that we got from mainline Imports ( http://www.mainlineimports.co.uk )
Now we get at least one phone call every day from somebody who has received our Bluetooth Marketing Message around the city