There is no escaping advertising, it is everywhere you look, and now it is beamed to your own pocket, thanks to new billboards which transmit ads to Bluetooth phones.
In the era of coining new words and phrases, the new advertising method has been dubbed 'Bluecasting'. Walk bast a Bluecasting billboard and you can expect your phone to ask if you want to receive an incoming media file. Accept it and a video ad will be downloaded to your phone.
How many people will actually accept these Bluecasts? Alasdair Scott, who co-founded the company that created the system, told New Scientist that over the course of two weeks, 17% of the 87,000 Bluetooth phones to come within range of the Bluecasting billboards accepted the offer of extra advertising goodies.
The biggest problem faced by this new advertising method is keeping people accepting the files. For the security conscious, Scott advised that only media files, and not executable code, would be sent via Bluecast (but that doesn't prevent somebody else sending files posing as ad material.) Scott foresees Bluecasting as a way of distributing "exclusive or valuable content to consumers" so that they'll actually want to accept it.
Will you happily be subjected to Bluecasting, or are you going to turn off your phone's Bluetooth functionality at the first sign of trouble?
