Failed hybrids
The death and life of Bluetooth proximity marketing
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 13012201 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gabriel Nicholas (0009-0004-2946-7736, New York Law School), Aaron Shapiro (0000-0003-4501-6914, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 465-487 |
| Publication date | 2020-12-04 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Mobile Media & Communication (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2050-1579 • E-ISSN: 2050-1587 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/2050157920975836 |
| OpenAlex | W3112454575 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 36 |
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons were once heralded as the “holy grail of marketing,” a “cookie” for the physical world. An entire industry—proximity marketing—evolved to capture value from beacon-enabled micro-location networks, with venture capitalists, startups, mobile operating systems suppliers, and major platforms all making substantial investments of data, labor, and resources in the technology. Despite these investments, beacons fell out of favor abruptly, with observers dismissing the technology as an overly cumbersome solution in search of a problem, a “low-value fad.” We offer a microhistorical account of beacons’ small yet untenable role in the ecologies of location-based commercial surveillance—from the standards wars between Apple and Google to the efforts of startups and tech giants to capitalize on the market’s enthusiasm for beacons, and finally, to the industry’s quiet collapse. Our analysis builds upon work on the relationship between platform and infrastructure. We argue that proximity marketers failed to construct a viable platform-infrastructure hybrid capable of monetizing beacon proximity data and identify three axes along which beacons frustrated marketers’ ambitions for the technology: scalability, exclusivity, and visibility. We conclude by revisiting the platform-infrastructure relationship to discuss beacons’ legacy in two surveillance systems: student tracking on college campuses and contact-tracing initiatives during the COVID-19 pandemic
Beacon · Bluetooth · Business · Computer security · Government (linguistics · Scalability · Telecommunications · The Internet · Wireless · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
Splintering Urbanism
Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure
"Stuff You Can Kick"
Communication infrastructures and the contest over location positioning
Metrics, locations, and lift
Sorting Things Out
Data Capitalism
Sovereigns, Spooks, and Hackers
Facebook’s evolution
The infrastructures of mobile media
The fourth screen
Algorithmic brands
All the world’s a shopping cart”
Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook
Automating the audience commodity
Making data mining a natural part of life
Untangling the Unwired
Impersonal subjectivation from platforms to infrastructures
Digital media infrastructures
The Internet of Landlords
The politics of 'platforms
When data is capital
The locative imaginary
Platform capitalism
The Platformization of the Web
The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure
People-based marketing and the cultural economies of attribution metrics
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |