Adaptive Pervasive Advertisement: Scenarios and Strategies

Digital screens increasingly pervade our everyday urban and social environments to serve a variety of purposes such as informing us about social and cultural events, traffic problems, or (in most of the cases) simply having the goal of displaying commercial advertisements. By exploiting pervasive computing and communication technologies, screens can “understand” who’s close to them and adapt accordingly the content shown on the screen, supplying to users a better service. In particular, advertisement companies can be lead to a much more targeted exploitation of the screen resource and, eventually, to higher revenues. In this paper, we firstly introduce the key concepts of adaptive pervasive advertisement, its potential scenarios of adoption and the design and implementation of a simple advertisement system. Then, we present and evaluate different strategies for composing the sequence of commercials to be broadcasted. Simulation studies demonstrate that an adaptive advertisement system, able to sense about people in the environment and of exploiting a context-sensitive strategy accordingly, offers a notable commercial advantage over traditional advertisement system, even when visitors demonstrate poor collaboration towards the system.