Location Based Marketing, which is commonly reffered to as LBM, is some ill shit. Believe me, if you don’t know what this technology is, tune in – cause it’s approaching and it’s approaching fast. The concept of LBM is relatively simple, imagine rather than seeing advertisements or messages on your web browser or TV that are targeted to you by your demographics, age, race, TV watching patterns, websites you go to etc…. you started getting messages and advertisements sent to you via your location in real time.
Location relevant advertising is already being toyed with by many of the major players (google, nokia, yahoo, loopt etc.). Seemingly all cell phones and PDAs are becoming increasingly sophisticated. I mean shit nearly all smart cell phones are coming ready “stock” equipped with GPS positioning systems, in fact by 2011, 720 million phones will be in use with GPS positioning functions – which is a staggering jump from the 180 million now (according to instat.com). Moving forward it becomes increasingly evident that this type of “location relevant advertising” is quickly becoming a reality.
Let me provide a broad example – you are walking down the street in San Francisco with some friends on a Friday afternoon, you know, bullshitting about the Giants and the good old days when you would drink kegs and miss class at Chico State. You have just bought the new Android phone from google (google is already aligning themselves with phone companies to execute their mobile strategy via android), equipped with GPS capabilities, upon signing up for your phone service Google provided you a list of “opt –in” options of items that interest you, let’s say you checked umm…..… “movies,” “beer,” “strip clubs,” “sports,” “street wear,” shit I don’t know…but the point is you selected things that interest you. When all of a sudden, you get a text or image with a message and GPS map sent to your phone from an ad server based on your location in San Francisco “Hey Brandon, it’s happy hour at Mo Mo’s Pub, we saw you were around the corner from us, come in for a free drink – on us” I don’t know about you, but me? I’d drop my shit and go grab a beer.
The marketing messages become increasingly more relevant when it is based on your location. It is like going to the movies and grabbing popcorn and a soda, when normally you’d never eat that shit, you bought it on the basis of your location, without thinking twice. Now for me, some things wouldn’t work, but on a Friday afternoon with some of my homies cruising through SF…I’d drop in Mo Mo’s Pub for sure.
The problem then is devising a way that marketers don’t abuse the system – because it would be disaster if you were driving through downtown SF and got 47 messages to your phone over a 5 block section. It is like how e-mail has been so abused to the point that we simply label it “spam” or “junk” and pay no mind to it. It (e-mail) was such a powerful tool in connecting companies with consumers, yet it was abused and not regulated properly, and has since been out-casted by consumers and is not only ineffective at getting marketing messages to them, but reflects poorly on the image of your brand.
All I am saying is that this is where we are going, don’t believe me? Check out Loopt.com
It is a social networking program for your PDA or Mobile phone that utilizes GPS and is based on you and your “friends” locations. The demand is there, the technology is there, all it takes is for a few key players to connect the dots. And it looks like that is going to happen in the very near future. So if you are a marketer, sack up dip shit, get with the program or lose, I am going to get with the program, how about you?
