LBS and Taxis and Advertising?

Russell wrote a great comment piece on Location Based Taxis and LBS Advertising - but in the end the feeling was that it really isn't going anywhere in that configuration. And that's fair enough - but where might it go?

Busses in London have been outfitted with the CrystalEyes CCTV since 2001, but in the last few months we've started to see additions to busses that include display of more than just CCTV images. Some displays are now showing advertising. (Oddly enough I can't find a website or any contact information for CrystalEyes at all!)

If we take the basic platform that will have advertisements either pre-loaded or even radio downloaded and associate GPS coordinates with them, it wouldn't be hard at all to display an appropriate ad based on the current location of the bus.

And then why couldn't we do that with Taxis? - Download a thousand ads that are geo-coded for display as the taxi travels.

And while we're at it, when the fare boards the taxi the driver could enter the destination address into a GPS direction system to ensure that they had the best route (of course a proper London taxi driver would never need such a thing) but this would allow the system to dispaly relevant ads to the destination when the taxi came within .25 km or so. This would be far better to advertisers as a person is getting "out" of a taxi then before they got in and went somewhere else.

Cost and Practicality

I asked my good buddy Zeno at Media Plus for his view on in Taxi advertising and the whole idea of geo-coding advertisements and he was generally only luke warm to the idea. According to Zeno, "Taxi advertising on the outside of the taxi is a pretty straight forward proposition. Those ads can be seen by 100's if not 1,000's of people as the taxi goes about it's day. Advertising In-Taxi can be seen by at most 5 people in a London cab and only about 3 in a NYC taxi." (Zeno is also fond of reminding me that NYC taxis have room for three people's torso's, but none of their legs!)



But is it mobile?

We are rapidly expanding the idea of what is mobile here - beyond just the realm of telecoms but to include all things that move with us through our daily lives. iPod PodCasts - iPod Video - Sony PlayStation - and now mobile taxis.

And with each one of these mediums we have to help the marketers decide how to best use these medium so that the messages delivered acheive the desired results - more, better, happier customers.

Whether it's mobile phone text messaging - or in-taxi advertising - mobile marketing has got to be more than clever - it's got to be TRVR (Timely - Relevant - Valuable - Requested ) or it is nothing more than SPAM to go!




And when trying to find a cheeky reference to London taxi drivers never being lost - I found this little gem...