Think global, act local
Posted on February 10, 2008 by Martin Zagorsek
After much hype, we’re finally starting to see the first testing of location based ads in the “real world”. I remember talk of location-sensitive ads as far back as 1999.. it’s an industry cliche by now - you’ll be walking by a Starbucks and it’ll zap a coupon for 20% off a latte directly to your phone. I can hardly wait.
Until the industry comes up with more compelling user scenarios, nobody’s going to opt into any such program, and privacy fanatics will slow down any plans to make location-based marketing the default. Forget about push advertising, sending me text messages will drive me crazy. The key to making location-based mobile ads work will be in their integration with mobile users’ behavior.
One big question is what will be the relative importance of media consumption vs search. Right now I often use my iPhone to get directions, find restaurants, or even just google something to settle a debate. Getting media over the air is still too slow for anything but text (news, RSS feeds), so it’s hard to tell whether media will play as large a role on mobiles as it does in regular web use.If search-oriented usage ends up being dominant, we might end up with more of a Google-style model, though I’m not sure pay-per-click will work as well on mobile devices. If mobile TV takes off on the other hand, the current local-TV ad model would work nicely with GPS-enabled targeting, with interstitial ads selected based on the user’s location. The ideal is for the user to not even know (or at least not be reminded) they’re being targeted - because at the end of the day, they don’t really care. Sphere: Related Content
» Filed Under Mobile Platforms
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