Using pervasive computing technologies to deliver personal and public ads in public spaces

Nowadays, advertisers and content publishers are constantly struggling to find the best advertising strategies to promote their services. They need to be able to reach the target population that is potentially interested in their products or services, without being too tiresome, and to deliver the content properly in order to capture users´ attention. In this paper we describe a system that uses pervasive computing technologies for advertising purposes. It uses contextual information and personal interactions to delivered ads to individuals and to support socially-aware content selection to best fit users´ interests in a public place. Based on personal interactions, the system builds an up-to-date social model that combines information about categories and ads the individual users´ accessed and contextual information. This model, combined with the ads characterization and financial issues, supports the decision of which ad will be presented at each moment. Based on these principles, an advertising system was developed and evaluated. Initial results indicate that this can be an interesting approach to improve the usefulness of pervasive advertising systems for both individuals and people in public spaces.