A New Perspective in Pervasive Advertising

Abstract

In commerce, advertising a potential customer with relevant offers is beneficial for both the advertiser, who increases the chances of acquiring a new customer, and the customer himself, who is stimulated to purchase without being overwhelmed by irrelevant ads. To achieve this goal, the advertiser must know the situation, the interests and the activities of his potential customers; in one word, their context. However, the exposure or the collection of these personal data has a clear repercussions on their privacy and is often constrained by law. PervADs is a usercentred pervasive advertisement-distribution platform which maximizes the relevance of the ads sent to potential customers while preserving their privacy. The relevance is determined by semantically matching the profile and the context of the customer against those carried by the ads, while privacy is guaranteed by a client-side matching algorithm where user's personal data are never accessed by the advertisers or transmitted to a channel. PervADs provides small/medium businesses with an autonomous and inexpensive infrastructure for contextualized advertising, without the need to traditional mass advertising channels such as radio, TV and newspapers which often have prohibitive costs.