Atoms + Bits: How Location Awareness Will Change Search Advertising

August 28, 2007 · Posted in Companies

Searching for things, not information about things.

Not that long ago there were just a few television stations or newspapers that everyone watched and read and advertisers would reach huge masses of people without regards to their suitability or interest. This shotgun, mass media for the masses, led to massive waste. As Wannamaker’s famous quip puts it “I know half my advertising budget is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.”

As media became more fragmented, appealing to niche interests and demographics, advertising fragmented along with it, continually gravitating toward content with the best contextual match for their brands and products.

Search engines moved this whole evolution into high gear by providing the ability to target ads in maximum context, not only to a vertical category of interest, but down to the level of a single search query, with an audience of one.

While better context alone has been a huge improvement for advertisers, the search engines’ combination of maximum context with the predisposition of users actively in search mode has proven to be the killer combination that is revolutionize advertising.

This high level of context combined with high engagement has allowed search companies to price on performance, which has been the linchpin of their success. This has proven to be such an incredibly lucrative combination that Google alone is now worth more than the leading old media companies of Disney, Time Warner and Viacom combined.

The most important contributors to the search success: 1. Maximum Context and 2. Right Timing

Location Awareness is The Next Step: Atoms + Bits

For all their successes, web search engines are currently still largely confined to the world of data on web-servers, connecting atoms to bits (you to information), not atoms to atoms (you to other people and stuff), at least not directly. Discovering a profile or description in a database can sometimes be the end goal, but very often the true end goal, particularly in mobile environments is to connect to some THING that exists in the real world, not information about that thing. Either to buy it, experience it, or hook up with it.

Location awareness will add a new and very significant dimension to the search business. As access to the Internet becomes ubiquitous, the location and circumstance under which a search is conducted could dramatically change the results sought. In the real world, people move around, as do the things that they may be interested in searching for. Items in one location will have a different context than if they were in another location and physical proximity will play an important role in determine if the timing is indeed right.

Mobile search users aren’t likely to be researching book reports… so understanding that the needs in the mobile circumstance may be different will be key. Search needs to develop to the point where searching for ‘bathroom’, ‘bus’ or ‘coffee’ on a mobile device can mean finding the nearest one of those THINGS in the world around you.

Take for example the man standing in the rain at bus stop in New York City. Opening up his mobile browser and searching for the term ‘bus’ today will get him the Greyhound corporate website, the city bus service in Hawaii, the Los Angeles county MTA, and two Wikipedia entries as the top five listings. Even if it did return a NYC transit based website, all you’re likely to get there is corporate information and timetables. Certainly this would be better than nothing, but still far short of what he really wants to know which is where is his bus!

Major developments needed to take place in order to take this next step in search services, specifically gaining situational knowledge and awareness, or the context in which the search is being done. Much of this context can be inferred from specific location cues, is the user at a bus stop, or in a baseball stadium or away from familiar territory?

Someone will also need to better attach bits to atoms and know the location of those atoms. Portable mini data storage that can communicate information about itself and its location out to the web will need to come into more widespread use to give web server like information that can be attached or associated with real life stuff, and its whereabouts factored into the search equation.

As the volume and usefulness of the underlying data expands, so too will the number of search queries… and we all know what that will mean for the bottom line of the search engine that enable it.

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