Taking Advantage of iBeacons for Advertising

While there are challenges in adjusting priorities and budgets as users shift from desktop to mobile, one of the benefits is being able to engage users in new environments using new information. One of the most exciting possibilities is the chance to use a mobile device to cross the divide between online advertising and offline action. In our recent Marin Hackathon, one of our teams successfully built a prototype of one fascinating way to bridge online and offline using iBeacons.

If you are not familiar, iBeacons are small bluetooth powered devices that can trigger very precise location information for iOS devices. A typical use case would include placing them around a department store or a car dealership to send alerts to phones giving customers deals or other context about their shopping experience.

We wanted to take this same real world information and use it for advertising. Imagine being able to count someone sidling up to the checkout counter as a conversion. Or we can target someone who strolled by a specific model of car at the dealership with an ad talking about the exact model and this months rebates, encouraging them to purchase today.

In order to make this work, we combined three core pieces of technology. Our Beta Mobile SDK for event tracking, our Cross-Device Targeting, and the Marin Display Real Time Bidding engine, giving us the ability to show a customer an ad on their phone and their desktop - as quickly as 5 seconds after we have seen them in store.

With some hard work on these tools and one very late coffee-fueled night, the team was able to get it working. We brought some iBeacons online and demo'ed the technology, showing live ads based off iBeacon signals on both a users phone and on their desktop. While the iBeacon feature isn't quite ready for prime time, we continue to work on it and the underlying tech for our Mobile SDK and our Cross Device match so we will be ready when a customer wants to roll this out to hundreds of their stores.

Is that customer you? Get in touch with us at info@marinsoftware.com

About the Author

Jordan is the Director of Programmatic Technology here at Marin Software. He has been working in the digital marketing space for several years, having co-founded Perfect Audience before its acquisition by Marin Software. He cares most about using interesting technology to build tools that solve problems for users and customers.