When television was invented were the commercial aspects of showing advertising to viewers even thought about? On July 3, 1928 when John Logie Baird demonstrated the world’s first color television transmission, it took another 13 years until the first television commercial was aired in the US. July 1, 1941 the Bulova Watch Company paid $9 to New York City NBC affiliate WNBT (now WNBC) for 20 seconds of air time just before a Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies baseball game. It showed a Bulova watch over a map of the U.S., with a voiceover of the company’s slogan “America runs on Bulova time!”

Soap operas received their name due to advertising campaigns to sponsor long running radio and television shows. Companies like Colgate Palmolive, Lever and Proctor and Gamble led the way in Soap opera sponsorship. Over time, the name stuck and now every long running television drama is referred to as a soap. In addition, television advertising became commonplace and a completely accepted form of reaching the masses.

At the time of buying a television set do people wonder which commercials will be airing that evening? The answer, unless you’re a marketing junkie, is no. When sitting at home watching a favorite television show, viewers have become conditioned to accept interruptions in the broadcasts to allow television commercials into their homes. Whichever way you look at it, it’s intrusive marketing. There you are sitting at home after a hard day at work, on the couch with a cup of cocoa and a water bottle and your favorite television show begins. Fifteen minutes or less into the broadcast and you’re bombarded by two to two and half minutes of advertising. Instead of getting angry and wanting to throw something at the television for wasting two minutes of your evening, the time is used to pay a trip to the bathroom, make a snack or get a cocoa top up. However, whichever way you look at it, this is intrusive marketing and not received with the permission of the viewer.

In a recent post by Douglas Karr, he quite correctly states that push marketing using Bluetooth technology is intrusive and is sent without ‘permission’ of the consumer. He concludes the article by stating that Bluetooth technology was not invented so that push advertising could target cell phones and send adverts based on location. Indeed it is a scary thought that a person is targeted as they walk around a mall. A comment in response to this article written by Mike Schinkel stated that the consensus of the attendees at a meeting on Leveraging the Mobile Web at Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs, felt somewhat aggrieved by this type of push advertising.

Bluetooth proximity marketing and television advertising; what are the differences? Let’s start with the similarities – both provide an advertising message on a widely used or viewed media platform. Both take a moment of your time that otherwise would not have been used to look at an advertisement of any kind. Both are intrusive. You certainly didn’t purchase a mobile phone or a television so that intrusive marketers could send advertising messages. But here are the differences – a television commercial can’t be instantly rejected by the viewer in order to continue watching the remainder of the broadcast. A television commercial usually doesn’t give an instant redeemable coupon for a store that you’re standing 20 meters from. (I say usually because television commercials can have immediate calls to action using URL’s or phone lines). When watching a television show in a relaxed atmosphere, shopping (unless you’re my wife) is the farthest thing from your mind – you’re not in the ‘shopping zone’. When receiving a message in a mall at least it’s in context with your current surroundings.

Maybe Bluetooth proximity marketing seems more intrusive than other forms of mainstream advertising because we’re just not conditioned to be approached while we shop. Maybe it doesn’t seem right because anyone with a PC, a Bluetooth antenna and some open source Linux software can send marketing messages to the masses. The act of ‘Bluetooth adverjacking’ is completely unethical. Maybe this is just as unethical as gathering trend data on web surfers and serving advertising, based on context. After all, if you know someone likes to look at vacation websites the chances are they may book a vacation if you show them some options. Adverjacking is on par with spyware (aka scumware). However, bona fide Bluetooth proximity marketing campaigns, similar to contextual vertical advertising platforms, are no different to television commercials.

In addition, I would go one step further and say that after a great deal of research on the subject of Bluetooth proximity marketing and the capabilities of two way push, receiving surroundings based information, on-the-spot offers and the ability to instantly reject or to receive based on Bluetooth activation preference, Bluetooth proximity marketing is actually less intrusive and potentially more helpful than television advertising.