Two field trials on the efficiency of unsolicited Bluetooth proximity marketing

We report two one-month-long field trials where Bluetooth access points deployed around Oulu, Finland, were employed to attempt to push unsolicited multimedia marketing messages to bypassing mobile devices that had their Bluetooth on and visible. The logs involving ~65000 unique discovered devices of real users show that only 0.12% of the ~650000 transmission attempts were successful. On average, 1.1% of the devices received the message and 3.3% of the owners of these devices signed up to the marketing campaign. These statistics characterize the efficiency of 'carpet bombing' type of proximity marketing realized with the current Bluetooth technology without any support mechanisms.