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Lawyers Are Sending Mobile Ads To Patients Sitting In Emergency Rooms
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Patients sitting in emergency rooms, at chiropractors' offices and at pain clinics in the Philadelphia area may start noticing on their phones the kind of messages typically seen along highway billboards and public transit: personal injury law firms looking for business by casting mobile online ads at patients. The potentially creepy part? They're only getting fed the ad because somebody knows they are in an emergency room. The technology behind the ads, known as geofencing, or placing a digital perimeter around a specific location, has been deployed by retailers for years to offer coupons and special offers to customers as they shop. Bringing it into health care spaces, however, is raising alarm among privacy experts.
Law firms and marketing companies from Tennessee to California are also testing out the technology in hospital settings. "Is everybody in an emergency room going to need an attorney? Absolutely not," Kakis says. "But people that are going to need a personal injury attorney are more than likely at some point going to end up in an emergency room." The advertisers identify someone's location by grabbing what is known as "phone ID" from Wi-Fi, cell data or an app using GPS. Once someone crosses the digital fence, Kakis says, the ads can show up for more than a month -- and on multiple devices.
Law firms and marketing companies from Tennessee to California are also testing out the technology in hospital settings. "Is everybody in an emergency room going to need an attorney? Absolutely not," Kakis says. "But people that are going to need a personal injury attorney are more than likely at some point going to end up in an emergency room." The advertisers identify someone's location by grabbing what is known as "phone ID" from Wi-Fi, cell data or an app using GPS. Once someone crosses the digital fence, Kakis says, the ads can show up for more than a month -- and on multiple devices.
They strive to hit new lows and this time they've nearly bottomed out. Some of them truly are ambulance chasers and now they let the ads chase the ambulances for them. Scum of the Earth, crud at the bottom of the barrel, less than human.
Relative to what attorneys pay AdWords for Personal Injury ads, they're not that expensive. Moreover, they're paid for on a CPM, not CPC model. The tracking cookie for retargeting might serve a CPC ad or dozen, but even those are cheaper than you'd think b/c tsill not adwords.
Disclaimer: I'm the President of Marketing for a law firm. We spend a ton on marketing... and I've known about this for years. We thought about this when it came out about 2 years ago, but don't like the CPM model and had other (ethical) concerns.