There's no escape: Ads come to your smartphone screen
There's no escape: Ads come to your smartphone screen
By Galen M. Gruman
Created 2014-07-11 03:00AM
Love to shop? Even if you don't, you may have no choice.
Having filled our physical mailboxes with junk mail, our roads with billboards,
our gas pumps and airport lobbies with ad-playing screens, and our email with
spam, marketers are targeting one of the few sanctuaries from the barrage of
sales "messages" in our everyday lives: our smartphones.
Mobile websites and most free (and some paid) mobile apps
typically show us ads on the screen, as one of the prices for free content and
services. But they're fairly subtle, which is why they don't work as well as
ads in other venues. It's also the reason why there's the Fronto app for
Android devices that puts full-screen ads where you can't avoid them: on the
lock screen you need to get past to use your device. Apparently, 9 million
users in Koreans have downloaded it and 2 million use it regularly. In west
Africa, Samsung's local subsidiary is making Celltick's similar adware tool the
start screen for Galaxy devices. The rest of us quake in fear that this will be
a new feature in Android one day.
Google, whose two primary businesses are selling ads and
building elaborate profiles of you to target those ads, had previously upped
the ante in pushing ads front and center. Android 4.4 KitKat's Google Now cards
feature, which purports to target information based on your interests, is
really a venue for placing ads in front of you based on your likes and
location. Fortunately, you can disable this disguised advertising.
You can also disable Fronto, that South Korean app that
puts allegedly targeted ads on your Android smartphone's lock screen. Assuming
you install it in the first place, that is -- which the company thinks you
will, because you can't shop till you drop if you don't know what to shop for.
Here's the Fronto pitch with my real-English translations in brackets, which
shows the mentality we're up against:
Research shows that mobile device users look at their
phones more than 100 times a day, so Fronto is making all this time worthwhile
[to advertisers, that is]. ...
What's interesting to consumers about Fronto is that with
the popularity in native ads [translation: ads disguised as content] and
decline of Groupon-type coupons and other daily deal sites, it has truly
demonstrated the limitation of the business model -- people are busy and
distracted and are increasingly unlikely to respond to daily deal emails that
are not immediately relevant to their interests. Lock screen apps offering
curated content [translation: targeted ads] are a better overall fit for what
people want now because they present offers upfront, before the user even has
logged into their phone, and because the deals can be curated/sorted/targeted
based on the user's specific interests. Several trends are converging to show
the potential of lock screen apps for conveying information and engaging with
users sooner, instead of competing for attention among dozens of rarely opened
apps on the typical mobile device.
Fronto enables Android users to earn money by engaging
with ads, deals, and relevant articles [translation: ads disguised as content]
in their lock screen, and its proprietary lock screen technology is an
effective vehicle for advertisers to deliver full-screen content to mobile
users.
By the way, in the two years that Fronto has been
avaiable in South Korea, it's paid about 50 cents per user, or $2.50 per active
user. People really sell themselves cheaply, don't they? Now you too can pawn
yourself for pennies and get spammed dozens of times a day as you look at your
smartphone screen. How can you resist downloading that app right now?
Sarcasm aside, the marketing industry truly believes
enough people are so addicted to shopping that they want to live in a world of
constant pitches -- a personal Home Shopping Network you carry with you.
Amazon.com hopes you're such a person; its new Android-based Fire Phone is all
about selling you stuff [5] on its device, based on tracking your actions. You
can even help it sell you more stuff by using its built-in object scanner to
get a deal on whatever you're scanning. It's all the convenience of shopping
online, only out in the real world!
The Android platform is where the worst advertising
impulses are playing out, but marketers are also salivating over Bluetooth
beacons [6], little gadgets that identify a location so that an app can know
where you are and interact with you based on location. Apple's iBeacons
technology [7] is already in many trials and is built in to all of its iPhones
and iPads from the last few years, if you're running iOS 7. Google is working
on its own beacons APIs for Android, but for now it's basically an iOS
technology.
Beacons have lots of virtuous uses, but the ones getting
all the attention focus on spam, such as sending you mobile coupons and alerts
[8] as you walk by a certain store or enter a certain section of that store.
Marketers love mobile coupons, and in the 15 years I've been covering the
mobile industry, it's remained their Holy Grail, a quest that fortunately has
not found its quarry yet. I suspect when they try to use beacons for such spam,
people will simply delete the apps that serve as the spam's conduit.
Of course, I also expect Google to make beacons alerting
part and parcel of a future Android and Chrome version, with no ability to turn
it off -- in the name of ensuring you get "relevant content,"
naturally.
There may be in fact be no escape. Perhaps we should all
give up, download Fronto now, and condition ourselves to love endless spam --
er, relevant content. After all, if we resist this effort, they'll start
playing ads on our car navigation systems instead. Oh, wait -- BMW is working
on that [9], too. (And you thought you'd escaped the tyranny of relentless
radio ads by using your iPod's or smartphone's music with the car's nav/audio
system instead.)
We must stop this now. Never download anything like
Fronto. Turn off all spyware on all your devices, even if they look like apps.
Install tracking blockers like Disconnect.me [10]. Draw the line somewhere! Or
there won't be one.
This article, "There's no escape: Ads come to your
smartphone screen [11]," was originally published at InfoWorld.com [12].
Read more of Galen Gruman's Mobile Edge blog [13] and follow the latest developments
in mobile technology [14] at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen's mobile musings on
Twitter at MobileGalen [15]. For the latest business technology news, follow
InfoWorld.com on Twitter [16].
Links:
[1]
http://www.infoworld.com/mobile-enablement?source=fssr
[2] http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/125442/the-must-have-ipad-office-apps-round-7-229442?source=fssr
[3]
http://www.infoworld.com/slideshow/105944/best-android-office-suite-shoot-out-220730?source=fssr
[4]
http://www.infoworld.com/newsletters/subscribe?showlist=infoworld_mobile_rpt&source=ifwelg_fssr
[5]
http://www.infoworld.com/t/cringely/fire-phone-amazons-direct-line-your-data-dreams-and-desires-244626
[6]
http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobile-technology/apple-tracks-shoppers-in-its-stores-nationwide-ibeacon-rollout-232322
[7]
http://www.infoworld.com/d/consumerization-of-it/apples-next-revolution-may-be-bluetooth-powered-ibeacons-227574
[8]
http://9to5mac.com/2014/06/16/ibeacons-in-retail-stores-blowing-up-app-usage-ad-engagement/
[9]
http://www.automotive-fleet.com/channel/gps-telematics/news/story/2014/01/bmw-developing-in-car-advertising.aspx
[10] http://www.disconnect.me/
[11]
http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobile-technology/theres-no-escape-ads-come-your-smartphone-screen-245017?source=footer
[12] http://www.infoworld.com/?source=footer
[13]
http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobile-technology/blogs?source=footer
[14]
http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobile-technology?source=footer
[15] http://www.twitter.com/mobilegalen
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