Taxi Advertising App that Grows the Partner and User Base

Customer

The end Customer is a US-based advertising company that helps enterprises to promote their products and brands via in-taxi video ads. For this, the company installs displays in their partner taxicabs allowing drivers to monetize the advertisements shown in their cars.

Challenge

The end Customer wanted to expand the pool of partner taxicabs and at the same time enhance their advertising offering by enabling in-taxi video ads personalized to a passenger’s traveling route. The company partnered with a popular taxi dispatch system provider that serves taxi drivers around the US and thus has access to the information about passenger pick-up and drop-off locations and time. With such data at hand, the end Customer’s central advertising system in its turn could tailor ads to particular passengers making the messages more targeted and effective. Therefore, the end Customer turned to ScienceSoft, a custom software development company, to get a solution to improve communication between the two systems and match an ever growing number of taxicabs with displays installed in them.

Solution

To handle the end Customer’s advertising challenge, ScienceSoft’s experts delivered a web service with a local database that works in the following way.

All partner taxicabs and devices are given unique IDs. The end Customer’s manager uses the web service to insert and update the information on the device IDs that are currently installed in particular cars.

Once a passenger gets in a taxi, the driver notifies the taxi dispatch system about the route and travel time. Then the web service retrieves this data from the taxi dispatch system and uses the car’s ID to find the advertising device installed in the taxicab.

At the next stage, the solution sends a request to the central advertising system of the Customer specifying the device’s ID and the accumulated information about the route. This way, the central advertising system learns which ad messages to pick up and tailor specifically to a passenger's ride, as well as to which device they should be transmitted.

When the passenger gets out of the taxi, the driver again sends a notification to the taxi dispatch system via a mobile device. Following the same workflow, the web service spots out the device’s ID and requests the central advertising system of the advertising company to stop displaying the ad.

Results

The end Customer received a solution for in-taxi advertising that helps to personalize ad messages in relation to passengers’ ride details. This allowed the company to boost the number of partner taxicabs, enhance their service for advertisers, as well as to make advertising more relevant and engaging for passengers.

Technologies and Tools

PHP, Symfony 2, Bootstrap CSS, MySQL, FOSRest, RabbitMQ.