Failed hybrids: The death and life of Bluetooth proximity marketing

Abstract

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.