What to make of Bluetooth marketing? On first reading, the results of Blismobile’s Bluetooth campaign to promote the launch of a new movie sound pretty good, with 205,000 downloads of the movie trailer. The 1% conversion rate referred to in the press release made me wonder if every one of the 20 million commuters potentially exposed to the campaign had received an uninvited message asking if they wanted to receive the trailer, in which case, as I’ve said before about Bluetooth, that’s an awful lot of people to annoy to get those 205,000.
In fact, a call to Blismobile’s PR confirms that this is not the case. While there is some random pinging of phones if you enter the download zone, Blismobile tries to get people to actively request the download with a call to action on posters on trains, or interactive billboards at train stations. This was all explained to me a year or so ago, in fact, when I met Blismobile boss Greg Isbister. I was impressed at the time by what he told me. It sounded like a better, less intrusive way of doing Bluetooth.
But then, arriving at London Waterloo train station this morning, I received a message asking me if I wanted to receive a Bluetooth message from the Nokia Ovi Store. I replied ‘No’. 10 seconds later, I received the same message. A couple of days ago, I had exactly the same experience, again from the Ovi Store, at Victoria station. Except this time I got it three times.
I’m not blaming Blismobile for this; I have no idea who is behind the campaign. But this kind of poorly executed rubbish is exactly why so many people have so little time for Bluetooth. The fact it’s a fairly well-known mobile phone brand behind it just makes things worse.
There used to be a debate about whether messages like this were illegal, but that was clarified a while back by way of some guidance from the regulatory authorities. They may be legal then, but many more campaigns like this and we won’t need the legislators to kill Bluetooth marketing – it will kill itself.

David Murphy
Editor