“Advertise” yourself with The Physical Web, and beyond…

Would you wear a t-shirt that advertises a webpage?

Attend any tech conference and you’d be hard pressed not to spot one. In fact, most of us advertise company brands every day by much more than just the clothes we wear.

Now, would you wear a t-shirt that advertises YOUR webpage?

Why not? You are your own brand. Perhaps a t-shirt isn’t your preferred communication channel? How about a mobile app?

There you have it: within 30 seconds, you can be advertising your personal brand as a webpage via an Android application. And, more importantly, there’s a non-negligible chance that someone Nearby will take notice!

For those interested in the technology (or the nerdy featured image), it’s all standard: Android can advertise URLs in Eddystone packets over Bluetooth Low Energy. And our open source json-silo accepts the profile of any Person, Product or Place as schema.org and JSON-LD, and returns an Eddystone-friendly URL. When queried, the json-silo returns the profile name as the title, and the profile description in the meta, both of which are used by The Physical Web to present contextual notifications on mobile.

In our previous blog post, we predicted:

this will be the year that a major social network empowers their users to “advertise” themselves in exchange for personalised everyday experiences

It’s technically possible. And the moment businesses start listening and responding to such ads, the incentives for both parties become undeniable. We’ve been preparing for that moment for a long time.

We are advertising!  The devices we carry and wear are already anonymously advertising our presence, and personalisation is inevitable. Here’s the question:  Are you listening?