One of the holy grails of the marketing world is relevant, location based advertising… in other words, giving people relevant offers close to where they are. After all, if you are walking around feeling like Indian food, wouldn’t it be great to be able to get a special offer from the closest Indian joint?
One of the leaders in this space is Foursquare – an app available on iPhone, Android and Blackberry that lets you “check in” at your favourite locations. The apps has a great social element… you can have friends and there is a bit of competition involved. The person who checks in the most times at a location becomes the Mayor of that place and you can see where friends have checked in. You can also earn achievement badges for being active (like the Scouts).
For a bricks & mortar business, Foursquare can be a great marketing tool since it lets you create special offers for people who check in, or just for the Mayor. Now, Foursquare is looking beyond specials to how they can provide custom offers and even check you in automatically. Mashable has good coverage of the presentation by Foursquare’s CEO at ad:tech.
The challenge for Foursquare is that Facebook has recently released it’s Places feature that is very similar. It allows users to check in and this is shared with their friends via their news feed. Now Facebook is opening up Places for specials as well – and they are the huge player in the space. According to Facebook, over 200 million people access their platform via mobile… pretty amazing.
The challenge for marketers, of course, is to not stuff up the mobile medium. If you’ve ever seen the Tom Cruise film Minority Report you will have an example of push advertising at it’s worst. On the other hand, if it’s opt-in and/or user pull based, this could be the most targeting, relevant advertising ever devised. Certainly Facebook seem to think so.
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