GSM: Giant Spam Machine?

GSM: Giant Spam Machine?

Mobile ads could be poison for users, networks and everybody else.

As Marshall McLuhan said, the telephone is a medium that demands total attention. There is a strong social norm that a telephone call must be answered, and that this overrides any other conversation that might be going on. For this reason, people hate telemarketing with a passion.

Hopes for successful mobile advertising rest on the idea that if you can make the ads relevant enough, then the public will actually like them. In turn, this depends on using the mobile networks’ contextual data to personalize the message, make it location – and time-aware. That sort of contextuality is also what advertisers hope the value of mobile advertising will be.

But doing this raises some problems. There are huge privacy issues – the law, general principles of politeness, and self-interest all mean that personalization data has to be rendered less, personal before it can be released from the mobile operator’s maw. Anonymity and personalization are very difficult to reconcile. But the first is vital, as otherwise the advertiser would be able to reverse-engineer the network operator’s customer database and knock the operator out of the business.

Contextuality also has consequences for the network infrastructure. If you’re doing context, that means that the ad server is making decisions based on data drawn from various network interfaces, including cell location, BSS-OSS, and user history at the least. That in turn means a lot of signaling messages. The Informer recalls gasping with disbelief at an IMS technical conference as the briefer showed logs of the SIP signaling involved in a test project and said that, whereas SS7 took four messages to put a call on hold and then resume it, their IMS had generated no less than 21 signalling messages for the same manoeuvre.

Now imagine trying to do contextual ads in that system. It sounds like the world’s first self-administered DDOS attack. Quick, call Logica-sorry, Acision-and get us another SMSC up here, pronto, and maybe one of those new Cisco switches while you’re at it.

An infrastructure spending binge is one problem. Another is more conceptual. “Contextual ads” mean adverts that are dynamic and event-driven. Rather than selling space near something, mobile networks’ ad sales team will be selling… what? The opportunity to show advert X if conditions FOO and BAR are fulfilled? In other words, advertising to mobile users is going to be more like programming than anything else.

Hands up anyone who thinks the ad world has the technical clue to cope with that. Media buyers and programmers are so different it stretches credibility to imagine they could breed. Mind you, the internet is currently pullulating with start-ups creating various ways to build scripty applications through a graphical user interface. Yahoo Pipes is the best-known, but there are a whole gaggle of techier, enterprise-level plays such as Teqlo and Coghead.

How exactly do you price an advert script created by an advertiser? They will have to have access to your systems to create and test the script, so it will be difficult to integrate this into a traditional ad-buying process. Two approaches sound possible – one would be an ecosystem where third parties come up with the script and pitch it to both the network and the advertiser, and the other would see the network operator charge for the component services of the script. Now there’s a good idea.