BusMate: Understanding Mobility Behavior for Trajectory-Based Advertising

Mobile advertising is a rapidly growing form of advertising, carrying with it the promise of more finely tuned, targeted advertisements. In this paper, we study mobile advertising in the use of public transportation (specifically, buses). Through a qualitative study, we identify a number of factors that can influence the effectiveness of mobile advertising for bus passengers. We then use these findings to inform a prototype advertising system for bus passengers, called Bus Mate. Collectively, our research suggests that the bus passenger's trip timeline (i.e., How long they will be on the bus, and where they are on the trip) is one of the most important factors in defining the users' attention level. We propose an attention graph and validate it using our experimental mobile application. Finally, we propose some design recommendations, based on our findings, for platforms aiming at targeting mobile ads to bus passengers.