From the USA Today, BP, the UK petroleum king, recently announced an initiative to outfit its 9,000 stations with WiFi. On the surface, maybe an eye-roller, but after reflecting for a few minutes, this gives rise to potentially interesting opportunities. Not knowing the distribution of BP stations (urban, rural, etc…) makes it difficult to make a blanket statement, but the advertising opportunities are interesting. The (irrelevant) money quote from the article:

[BP spokesman] Strickland thinks Wi-Fi can do the same thing for BP [sic]. “We want people to feel comfortable sitting in our BP stations just like they do in Barnes & Noble and Starbucks,” he says.

We’re all a bit dubious about feeling as comfortable leaning up against a gas pump as sitting in a cozy Starbucks with a Frappuccino, but the point is well-taken.

Kidding aside, could it be that BP acts as a local advertising aggregator? With the pending exposion of shipped WiFi chipsets, non GPS-enabled devices might have a better chance of being served relevant advertising. However, the massive elephant in the room is advertiser acquisition cost. While uber-fast connections will be enjoyed by those who can afford them, Umibot knows that with the rise of WiMax/Ultra Wideband/3/4G/Clearwire and others, alternatives to high-speed connectivity exist, but adoption is low–outside of the smartphone/tech warrior set, most of us relay on 2.5G or WiFi.

I’m dictating this entry — thank heaven for voice recognition — from the passenger seat of a Hyundai GPS-King careering along the Beltway. I downloaded a cool plug-in to block out the gas-food-lodging ads that hit my screen a quarter mile before each exit, so I’m free to concentrate. What do I care about lodging anyway? The best thing about being a top-tier geo blogger is that everyone knows where you are. When the buddy list tells folks you’re in town, they ping to offer you dinner and invite you to sleep on the couch….

These ideas aren’t new, but Sterling combines and weaves them into a tapestry that makes the future come alive. Next time you are in a corporate planning session, don’t think up new products for the future. Read Sterling’s work and chart a course to get there. It’s much harder. And more rewarding.

-From APB

Geographical targeting of advertising can happen by geo-intelligence on the serving platform or by a user profile/explicit communication of the desired search area (ie, Cambridge, 02138, user profiles, etc.). Within paid search, Google’s AdWords, Yahoo’s Panama, and MSN’s adCenter represent the primary means of delivering text-based advertising. Since more than 75% of the web’s search traffic is carried by Google and Yahoo!, they are significant players. Contextual and rich media ads represent a smaller but more rapidly growing segment and includes is driven by Google’s AdSense, DoubleClick, smaller publishing networks and a vast ecosystem of ad networks, agencies and other intermediaries.

Geotargeting within the ad serving platform is generally limited to its embedded geo-intelligence. Internet Protocol-based geotargeting seeks to convert a computer’s IP to a real-world location. In theory this is an intuitive and valuable approach; assuming the user is searching in this area, advertisements could be geographically targeted to a very local level. In practice, this rarely happens. Internet service providers commonly use load-balancing equipment to distribute traffic across their network. The experience of all AOL subscribers’ IP addresses showing up Dulles, Virginia, is the most widely-known example of this happening. The end result is geo-IP lookup that provides consistent results for the city or metropolitan area. At times, increased granularity (ZIP code) can be achieved, but this is by no means guaranteed.

In addition to a website determining the user’s location based on IP lookup, users can directly provide information about their desired location to perform a search. Because user profiles (such as My Yahoo!, Google Accounts, etc..) are predetermined, they require no additional effort for the user. However, if a user is searching outside the area contained in her profile, results will be bogus. The vast majority of the time, this is the scenario–it is up to the searcher to define the geographic proximity, and that is where the system breaks down. ‘Formal geography’– cities, addresses, postal codes and others are recognized by search engines, but the informal geography–proximity to schools, parks, neighborhood locations, key landmarks, etc…, are recognized in a keyword, not spatial, method. This is critical and is the difference between (say) coffee shops located in Tribeca, Manhattan and the Tribeca Coffee shop in Krakow, Poland or Durban, South Africa.