A UK advertising firm says it has carried out the biggest Bluetooth advertising campaign to date, reaching 15,000 Londoners directly via their cell phones.

The campaign, carried out to promote the launch of Coldplay's album "X&Y", is just one of several that are being pioneered in and on billboards, movie theaters, airports and train stations around the United States and Europe.

The upshot: Advertising is coming to a cell phone near you.

The new technique uses Bluetooth, the short-range wireless technology now found in all but low-end handsets. Bluetooth is mainly used to connect peripherals such as wireless headsets to a cell phone handset or PC.

But, as users have found in areas with a high concentration of Bluetooth users, the technology can be used to send all kinds of content to anyone nearby.

Filter UK, the mobile marketing agency behind the Coldplay campaign, embedded its Bluetooth ad servers in giant television screens in several central London train stations. The screens promoted the album and also urged users to switch their Bluetooth handsets to "discoverable" mode, so that they could receive more content.

Commuters with discoverable Bluetooth handsets passing within 100 meters of the billboards were sent a message asking if they'd like to receive the Coldplay content, which included video interviews, music clips and still images.

The billboards detected 87,000 unique discoverable handsets, of which 13,000 opted to receive the material, a response rate of about 15 percent—very high by advertising industry standards.

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The content on offer changed regularly, with new clips added at least once a day, Filter said. "The key advantage of this for the consumer is that it's delivered for free, bypassing the mobile operators, and it should be content relevant to them and the area they're located in," said Fred Durman, Filter's commercial partner.

Europe, and later the United States, will soon be seeing the kinds of mobile promotions that are increasingly frequent in wireless-saturated Asian countries such as Korea, Durman said.

For marketers, it's an invaluable opportunity to get into consumers' personal space—something that also makes advertisers wary of offending potential customers.

"A mobile phone is very personal; it's possibly the most personal screen in your whole life," Durman said.

While the Coldplay campaign may be the biggest Bluetooth campaign yet, it isn't the first.

In the United States, the pioneer is WideRay, which has just finished a summer-long campaign at several Loews movie theatres around the country—in New York's Lincoln Square, Loews Universal Citywalk in Los Angeles and the Loews Metreon in San Francisco.

Instead of billboards, WideRay installed its "Jack Service Point" units in theater kiosks, and offered downloads via Bluetooth or infrared. The downloads featured content related to the Fox films "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", "Fantastic Four" and "Kingdom of Heaven," and included movie trailers, ring tones and wallpaper images.

Technology from Filter and competitor Hypertag Ltd. has been used in several previous campaigns in the United Kingdom. Filter Bluetooth ads tied into British Airways billboards around London convinced 10,000 users to download content earlier this year.

Filter also powered successful ads for Range Rover and Volvo in London's Heathrow airport this spring, as well as advertising kiosks in Bristol sponsored by Carling, a British beer brand.

Maiden, a major handler of UK billboards, is outfitting its advertising spaces with Filter technology in 30 train stations around the United Kingdom.

Hypertag has carried out two major Bluetooth promotions for album launches, one for a New Order album in March, and the other in August for the Goldfrapp album "Supernature."

The New Order promo was embedded in kiosks in HMV UK Ltd. music stores in London and Manchester, England, while the Goldfrapp launch uses a downloadable Java application called Hyperstore and is promoted through billboards and Goldfrapp performances.

Bluetooth ads are made practical by the growing density of Bluetooth in Western countries. In all of Western Europe, 19 percent of cell phones will be Bluetooth-enabled by the end of this year, according to Strategy Analytics, nearly doubling to 64 million from 35 million last year.

Filter said it believes the density in the United Kingdom is higher, upward of 30 percent.

In North America, the analysis firm puts the figure at 32 million handsets, about 14 percent of the total, by the end of this year. That's up from last year's 15 million. Bluetooth is also popular in China and Korea, but not as much in Japan, where technologies such as 3G and GPRS are more widely used.

Not all advertisers are in love with Bluetooth marketing—JCDecaux, a UK billboard competitor to Maiden, currently is staying away from Bluetooth because it could be too intrusive for consumers, the company said. Filter said it is sensitive to such concerns, but believes that its invitation model works for users.

"We are making an assumption that if [users] make their Bluetooth discoverable, it's like publishing your number in the phone book," Filter's Durman said. "In the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe, if you're discoverable, you'll find you receive communications from passers-by, let alone brands selling something. It's disingenuous to say that people who've made Bluetooth discoverable don't want to receive content."

If users decline the initial invitation from a Filter billboard, they won't receive further messages from that campaign, although the opt-out doesn't apply to future campaigns. Ultimately, though, the only way to fully opt out is to switch Bluetooth out of discoverable mode, which is the way many handsets are shipped to begin with.

The other major concern is security. Filter said it won't send executables, and informs users of this policy in its advertising material. The idea is that if users see the Filter's "BlueCasting" brand, they should know the content is both worthwhile and safe.

In addition, any phone asks a user before it installs an executable file. That means if someone were to masquerade as a BlueCasting promotion and send an executable, users will still have a chance to cancel the installation process, Filter said.

But that's splitting hairs, according to some security analysts. They argue that if users get used to receiving content via Bluetooth, they're only a step away from installing potentially dangerous executable code on their handsets.

"This company might not send executable code, but someone else certainly could," said security expert Bruce Schneier in a Weblog post. "And what percentage of people who use Bluetooth phones can recognize 'the kind of file they are downloading'?... This is almost certainly another avenue for attack."

More and more sensitive data is being stored on high-end phones, Schneier noted. And two methods for attacking Bluetooth phones have come to light earlier this year—a method for cracking Bluetooth PIN codes, and a $400 interceptor designed to target Bluetooth devices.

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