Location capabilities provide better targeted mobile advertising
Mobile Marketer
September 21st, 2010
Interest in commercial location-based services accessed from mobile devices-from navigation to social networking-continues to climb.
ABI Research projects the market for location-based social networking alone to reach $3.3 billion by 2013. And, indeed the field of social networking services is quickly crowding.
The August announcement of Facebook's Places mobile check-in service, for example, drew major media attention, given the potential threat to competing services like Foursquare and Gowalla.
Location-based social networks are seen as a promising gateway to mobile-advertising revenues, as personalized messages are delivered to targeted, receptive consumers where they are at the moment.
But to encourage large-scale consumer participation mobile-device users must be instantly and precisely located to deliver relevant and timely promotions.
Relevance matters
Consumers do not want to be flooded with offers that are not pertinent to them from a geo-location standpoint.
The more accurate the location technology is, the more enthusiastic people will be about these services, and their willingness to opt-in to mobile-advertising programs will soar.
A high-accuracy location capability is especially critical indoors and in dense-urban areas. It is in these settings that consumer demand and revenue potential for social networking, mobile advertising and other commercial LBS are at their highest but the prevalent, satellite-based location technologies are at their weakest.
Global Positioning System (GPS), for example, does not work indoors or where there are "urban canyons."
However, the technology landscape is changing.
New Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations in the area of E911 emergency response are currently being defined, which could mean wireless operators will have to enable higher-accuracy location capabilities across all environments-with strong impact rippling through the LBS and mobile-advertising space.
Finding consumers where they actually are
Retailers, consumer brands, hospitality service providers and many other businesses see ripe opportunities in mobile advertising to drive sales and strengthen customer relationships.
That potential hinges on the capability to reach consumers where they are and at the moment they are ready to spend, providing an immediate call to action.
Statistics show that the primary place to find people is indoors.
The Environmental Protection Agency says that Americans are indoors about 90 percent of the time, on average.
Furthermore, in a recent survey, J.D. Power noted that the percentage of wireless calls made indoors had climbed to 52 percent, and surely that ratio is rising rapidly given that consumers continue to drop landline phones in favor of going wireless only.
It is clear that the ability to locate users of mobile devices when they are indoors is growing in importance.
For commercial LBS applications to attract consumers in large scale and offer optimal potential to mobile marketers, they must be able to precisely, rapidly and automatically locate any and all users inside shopping malls, homes and office buildings - anywhere people live, work and play.
