Things keep getting more interesting at the Grid. This week we decided to map out the moods of a sample of Grid users so we could get an idea of the daily zeitgeist of the country. Have a look at the map below, its very simple at the moment and doesn’t indicate stacked moods (at this zoom level many are stacked on top of each other).

Once again this is going to allow us to raise the bar in terms of expected mobile advertising targeting. From late October we will include mood in the matrix of target-able criteria for advertising on the Grid. The full list will represent the following:

1. Location – radius from a point, or suburb/city/province boundary, or user-defined polygon
2. Time of day – define visibility by hour
3. Gender
4. Age
5. Mood

You could put together some fairly complex combinations, e.g.
Just before lunch, show my ad to women within 10km of Fourways Mall, between the age of 25 and 30, who are feeling sad, sleepy, angry or irritated

(Thursday 10 Sept 10AM)

Realistically what will happen right now is that campaigns targeted this tightly will not yield enough volume, but this is a long-term strategy as the industry moves towards CPA and CPSA and the Grid continues to grow its user base. Over the past 12 months we have grown to half the size of Facebook in South Africa, so the plan seems to be working.

The work we’re doing on the advertising side of The Grid makes digital advertising relevant to small businesses again because it removes the problems of geographic wastage and low penetration-levels inherent in the Web accessed via PC. The thing that really excites me about the scenario where the local Yoga class or hairdresser uses location-targeted advertising is the potential to deliver paying customers into a physical location. Overlapping targeting and low volumes within a small radius are a blessing in a way -the average hairdresser would probably buckle if you tried delivering more than ten new customers a day for longer than a week. I’ll be happy when we’re delivering clicks that create life-long walk-in customers.