Now That's Mobile Ad Targeting [Advertising]

Social discovery network and mobile application BrightKite has formally announced the availability of a whopper of a mobile advertising solution.

Advertisers have a whole range of targeting features including location and place, behavior and activity, conversational context, time of day, weather, demographics and media usage. If that weren't enough, BrightKite is also providing three times of "time relevance" their their targeting including historical (e.g.  people who go to the movies more than twice per month), Current (e.g. people currently within one mile of a KFC restaurant), and Future, (e.g. people in places where it will rain during the weekend.

BrightKite provided three excellent examples of how the targeting would work from some of the 20 brands that ran the system over the summer.

• For Jack in the Box, Brightkite targeted ads to people within two miles of restaurants in the week following the launch of smoothies in each restaurant. The smoothies launched in different places at different times, so the campaign staggered location by location. The campaign offered users an SMS coupon for a free smoothie.
• For Chevrolet, Brightkite targeted ads to people within three miles of a dealership on Saturday or Sunday afternoons. Chevrolet saw response rates between one percent and two percent visiting the dealership.
• Mynewplace.com wanted to target people with locally relevant creative. Rather than run a nationwide campaign that said, "Find homes to rent near you," Brightkite was able dynamically create and deliver ads that said, "Find a home to rent in Tulsa," localized to whatever city the user was currently in. The ads clicked through to a listing of homes to rent in proximity order to the consumer.

Jonathon Linner, CEO of Brightkite commented: "Our first rule of advertising is to think about the user experience. Consumers actually like advertising when it is relevant to their needs, and find it an annoyance when it is out of context. We use a combination of location, activity, demographic and time targeting to match the right advertising campaign to the right user at the right moment. Ultra-targeted advertising gives us happy users and happy advertisers. We are consistently seeing click through rates of more than five percent for our ultra-targeted campaigns."