Developing Location-Based Advertising in Kimathi University

Abstract

Traditional advertising e.g broadcast media and billboards is expensive and lacks the precision of targetting individuals in a specific location. These two factors ensure that small businesses, which constitute the bulk of the economic activity in Kenya, are not able to afford the privilege of getting their message across. Location-Based Advertising (LBA) adds a spatial dimension to existing advertisement channels through targetting personalized advertisements to users based on their current location. The businesses within Kimathi University are run by students and individuals from the local community. These are micro and small businesses with little working capital and minimal advertising through word of mouth, noticeboards, and posters. Word of mouth is time-consuming while noticeboards and posters run into the challenge of determining the optimal placement location. A fully operational LBA addresses this specific problems facing these small businesses. The workflow in this study entailed reviewing existing LBA services and identifying factors critical to their success; developing an LBA for the Kimathi area based on those factors; assessing the performance and utility of the LBA. The LBA was a pull service allowing users to search for advertisements ranked by distance from their current location. The advertisements were crowdsourced by users using their mobile devices on the go as opposed to making use of an intermediary brokerage systems. Peer to peer messaging was used as a feedback channel between buyers and sellers. The final version of the LBA achieved the highlighted objectives to an acceptable degree. The translation of the general specifications to an LBA for the local context, however, was not a straightforward process. Existing LBA in other areas of the world work with digital inventory management software that makes it easy to compare and personalize offerings by different vendors. This is not the case in our local context given the nature of the businesses themselves (small and personal) and the nature of the product offerings (groceries, basic services, etc.). Despite these issues, the LBA was a success and proved its utility as a viable advertisement channel for small businesses given its simplicity, affordability and location precision. The majority of test users could easily navigate the LBA to create and search for geotagged advertisements that were specific to a given location without assistance. The LBA specifications highlighted in this report form a better representation of local requirements and hence a better foundation for local research in LBA. Bringing together the various components of this technology and promoting its numerous benefits to a large mass of small vendors presents a major opportunity going forward.