Proximity-Based Mobile Advertising - Interview with iSign CEO, Alex Romanov
iSign Media is a company based out of Toronto, specializing in location-based content delivery. The company has developed a patent-pending “proximity-based” advertising solution that prompts smartphone users to nearby content like picture coupons, videos, music, maps and schedules. Technorati spoke with company founder and CEO, Alex Romanov, at ad:tech San Francisco, to learn more about what the company is doing.
With its solution already deployed at 1,400 global locations, iSign identifies 900k phones a day. The way it works is something like this. I walk into a Walgreens and am prompted to access the ad Wi-Fi signal. When I do, I’m given relevant content and advertising the store is providing me. Alex explains, “We don’t call it location-based because that suggests something to do with GPS. We call it proximity.”
Citing a prediction given by industry analyst Mary Meeker at last year’s Web 2.0 Summit, Alex tells me, “The greatest technology will be the kind that shifts traditional advertising to mobile.” To do this well, Alex believes that mobile technology needs to deliver on two things: Engaging an actionable audience, and delivering measurement of that action. “There’s lots of money invested in digital signage,” he explains, “but marketers are estimating their returns from it on a proposed figure. There’s no true, consistent, accurate measurement of who’s seeing these ads and how effective they really are.”
iSign offers an ad spend that can be measured in real-time, based on a three-point process: Attract, transact, and measure. For marketers that’s great, and the sentiment from users is that it’s valuable, as well. Because viewing this content on your phone is opt-in only, we’re all given choice whether to participate or not. And if we find the deals extremely valuable we can subscribe further into a store’s loyalty program. Continued on the next page
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