• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, March 30, 2005

Today's fun fact... there are currently more than 30 million Wi-Fi users in North America. There are approximately 118 million users worldwide, generated via more than 125 million Wi-Fi hotspots around the world (stats courtesy of Pyramid Research via BusinessWeek Online).

If you didn't think Wi-Fi was going to have an impact, think again.

It becomes rather obvious how important Wi-Fi is in today's world. Between my office, my home, Starbucks, and the airport, at least 75 percent of my life is Wi-Fi enabled. If my gym throws up a network and my two favorite Thai restaurants follow suit, this number will probably shoot up to 95 percent.

Anywhere I go now, I can jump online and stay in contact with the world. My phone is Wi-Fi enabled and I recently saw a refrigerator that was Wi-Fi enabled. When your kids grow up and start to enter the workforce, don't be surprised if they inherit a world where nowhere is out of touch from the information superhighway! A wireless network will be as ubiquitous as a street light or a trash can.

As people become more connected to the digital world, there are implications on the accountability of advertising. As we all know, advertising is continuously moving towards becoming more measurable. The problem is that as all media becomes measurable, the target audience is multi-tasking more, as well. As the audience multi-tasks and is exposed to multiple forms of advertising at the same time, how do we determine what combination of media is the most effective? What are the parameters for assigning value to stand-alone media vehicles?

In a traditional testing environment, an advertiser would isolate the variables and run ads in one form of media while not utilizing other forms in the marketplace. This model for testing is fast becoming inadequate as media becomes global. We always talk about the globalization of the economy, but this phenomenon also applies to media. The Internet, while having some capabilities for targeting by region, is truly a global medium. Recently I heard that approximately 40 percent of the Yahoo! home page traffic is international. This is a telling stat. If media is truly becoming globalized in the same way as the economy, how can we ensure that our ads are being as focused on the individual or on the small group, as we predict they will be?

Within technology lies the answer. Have you seen "Minority Report"? In the movie, the average consumer is targeted by ads that only they can see, as many of them are broadcasted directly into the retina of the consumer. There appears to be many different ads targeted to each person, supporting the ongoing issue of clutter.

But what if there exists one technology to help target the consumer across multiple forms of media? What if the Wi-Fi world, with your phone or some other personally identifiable gadget, became the central repository for your identification? What if the worldwide Wi-Fi network, which is inevitable, could provide advertisers with a "Surround Session" that was cross media?

The ads you saw online would be targeted to you. The ads on your phone would be targeted to you. The ads on your interactive TV box would be targeted to you. The ads in your digital magazine would be targeted to you. All of these ads would be tracked from a central database and could even be purchased as a roadblock by one advertiser, effectively owning that daypart or that day of the week? What if you could only see ads for Gatorade on Saturday when you are coming from the gym or you were only exposed to ads for McDonalds when it was lunchtime? What premium would advertisers pay for that?

As the world moves towards Wi-Fi and the ad business moves towards more accountability, this is a distinct possibility. Who is in the best position to create this type of a product? A few names and companies come to mind, but I would hate to give them away here. Besides, who's to say they are not working on this already?

What do you think?