‘CLIQ Here

By: Rich Kane

Chirantan Bhatt’s daughter is a digital advertising genius. She’s also seven years old, and at least partially responsible for her dad’s creation of TapCLIQ, a location-based user engagement and mobile ad platform.

It all started a few years ago when Bhatt observed his daughter fiddling with his mobile phone and wasn’t too keen on the idea of random ads being flung at her. So he thought, what if an ad would only pop up on your phone at certain moments? Like when you’re near a business that’s on the hunt for customers? One that wasn’t disruptive and messed up your mobile experience the way certain types of ads can?

“We help publishers reach an audience when they’re most susceptible, based on engagement,” Bhatt said. “With most mobile advertising, everybody is bombarding the user, but the user is not looking at the ads at all. That’s ‘user blindness.’ We help publishers and retailers eliminate that blindness. We want to drive meaningful interaction.”

Key to Bhatt’s “meaningful interaction” philosophy is for TapCLIQ-generated ads to connect with mobile users at those precise moments when audiences are more likely to be responsive to an ad. Pull up a newspaper’s app or mobile site, and location-based technology alerts you if you’re in close proximity to an advertiser you might find interesting. Yet the ad only appears for about 10 seconds, unlike intrusive banner ads people can’t seem to click away from fast enough.

 “There are moments, logical break points, at which you can consume something,” Bhatt said. “TV is a good example. After watching TV for seven minutes, you can watch an ad for one minute. That’s what we’re looking to do in mobile advertising.”

Bhatt echoes a conundrum familiar to many a sales staff and advertiser who have wrestled with the limitations of mobile, particularly screen size issues, where an ad is so small that it can barely be seen clearly, or the ad itself takes the user out of the app completely.

TapCLIQ, Bhatt explains, offers a much more holistic approach to mobile. Tap on an ad, for example, and a phone icon pops up that will connect you to the advertiser and have you speaking with a real live person with just one more touch, all while remaining in the app.

There’s also a more interactive element to TapCLIQ as well, Bhatt said.

“With our location-based ads, if you’re using an app in a particular geography, it might ask you if you’re interested in, say, Philadelphia sports news. When the Eagles game is on and I’m on the Philadelphia Inquirer app, it might ask me if I like the quarterback, if I liked his pass, if the coach should be fired. So it’s opinion-based chat, it becomes very user-friendly and interactive, and it acts like a multi-screen experience with TV. These kinds of opinion-based ads drive user participation and provide really relevant data.”

For more information, visit tapcliq.com.