Pervasive symbiotic advertising

The proliferation of powerful mobile devices and the deployment of large displays in public spaces give rise to new and exciting opportunities in personalized and targeted advertising. Advertising in such public spaces also raises interesting questions in several areas such as capturing and aggregating user context, tailoring of ads, measuring advertisement efficacy, capturing user attention, charging model and monetization, user privacy, and the roles of parties in the ecosystem among others. In this paper, we introduce the opportunities and challenges in delivering advertisements to ambient displays utilizing information pertaining to users near the display. We then discuss some ways to address them and describe our first prototype. Though many traditional challenges concerning the design, usability, connectivity, and applications of mobile systems are still important, we believe that applications and challenges resulting from symbiosis between mobile systems and surrounding devices, such as the subject of this paper, are a rich area for further exploration by the mobile computing community.