Targeted Mobile Advertisement in the IP Multimedia Subsystem

Introduction

In traditional media such as print media, television or radio, advertisement is one of the main revenue sources. With the rise of the Internet in the recent decades, a new form of media has been established that also relies on advertisement as one of its core revenue sources. Compared to traditional media, where advertisements are mostly focused on a specific target group and less to a certain viewer or listener with his or her individual preferences, the Internet allows for a much more targeted i.e. personalized advertisement presentation. Due to increasing bandwidth in mobile networks, the availability of smartphones with higher display resolutions and thus the increasing popularity of the mobile Internet, mobile advertisement is gaining more and more importance. In the case of mobile advertisement, targeted advertisement is even more evident e.g. using the location of a user for a better advertisement selection. Thus the provision of contextual data like location is of high relevance. In mobile networks, a transition towards Next Generation Networks (NGN) is currently happening. The most prominent example for NGN is the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) that is under standardization by 3GPP.

The problem, this chapter is investigating, is how can a network operator leverage intrinsic subscriber information, for instance the subscriber's position or the fashion a subscriber uses the operator's network, in order to provide more meaningful, more relevant advertisements to that subscriber. More specifically, this chapter studies targeted mobile advertising with an application to the IMS, due to its prominence.

This chapter is organized in the following fashion: First of all an overview is provided on mobile advertisement concepts along with an introduction to IMS. Moreover, a solution framework for targeted advertisement in IMS is presented. Later on, a new entity is introduced, the Personalization and Advertisement Insertion Logic (PAIL), which is the core component of the proposed targeted advertisement solution and is presented in detail. Part of the PAIL is the advertisement selection algorithm that is based on a Vector Space Model (VSM). Finally, an evaluation of the advertisement selection is presented which includes user tests.