Internet-enabled mobile devices are fast becoming the new playground for advertisers, since for the first time, companies don’t have to anticipate where a potential customer might go, but instead can display ads based on a customer’s real-time location.
Montreal-based Profilium Inc. said it soon will introduce software that will enable advertisers to reach users of personal digital assistants, Web-enabled phones and two-way pagers through network service providers, without violating the user’s privacy, or altering the service provider’s infrastructure.
“We basically sit in the middle between traditional advertisers and network providers,” said Alexandre Legendre, co-founder and director of business development for Profilium.
The technology-agnostic software is installed by the network service provider. It builds anonymous user profiles, which then can be accessed by advertisers looking to target their ads to the right person at the right time, Profilium said.
“We mine the data off the switch. We provide the software to remove the unique identifiers such as name, phone number and address, so we have only location data … from that data we will infer or create profiles of these users, both psychographic and demographic,” Legendre explained.
A customer of a service provider using this software should receive an average of only 10 to 15 messages per month, and should avoid what Legendre calls “air spam,” or unwanted messages. This junk wireless advertising can cause problems for network service providers because it ties up spectrum, which already is scarce.
Perhaps the biggest concern for both Profilium and mobile-device users is privacy. The Federal Trade Commission recently found many dot-com companies are not properly safeguarding their customers’ privacy, making them the target of not only unwanted advertising, but serious crimes such as credit-card fraud and personal identification theft.
Legendre said Profilium is trying to avoid such security violations with Internet-enabled devices, and is following Europe’s lead, where he said he “knows for a fact the standards for the protection of personal information are much more stringent than they are in North America.”
In North America, “Network service providers find themselves in a conflict of interest if they use the information they receive for anything other than billing services,” said Legendre. “But we’re gathering the data in a passive mode. We don’t need people to actually use their phone to trigger the message.”
Instead, a customer entering a specific coverage area and fitting the appropriate profile will be sent a targeted advertisement.
“And because we sit in the network as opposed to advertising on the Internet or on a PDA, we can do things like interexchange profiles,” Legendre said.
A prototype of the software should be available sometime in June, and a trial is set to begin in September in Canada.
Profilium was co-founded by Legendre and Aaron deMello, who also is the company’s chief operating officer. Both are ex-Ericsson professionals. The company also employs 10 software engineers.
