9/10/2010 9:47:28 AM
IT Comms news: Location based mobile marketing worth $1.8bn!?
Lots of us have handsets or devices with location apps on them
(the iPhone with Google Maps for example), and this presents fresh
opportunities for retailers to get customers through their doors
and spending money. ABI Research predicts the mobile location based
advertising market to be worth $1.8bn by 2015.
More advertisers are now getting plugged into this
location-based technology: with the rise of social gaming services
where users tag where they are at any one time, a captive audience
of mobile users, who are increasingly sharing their location, is
being created. Facebook has added a location feature to its
service, Twitter allows you to tag a location and a map to where
you are tweeting from.
While it is early days the options for advertisers are becoming
increasingly defined with three sets of locations in operation -
GPS, Wi-Fi and cell-ID (the latter approximates your location by
using the identity of the nearest base station you are connected
to).
For retailers the process now involves analysing their
customers' mobile and location habits, before choosing which
location based service partner to be used.
Will the mobile community be put off by the Big Brother
approach? It might start to feel like we're living in a real-life
version of the Tom Cruise flick "Minority Report"...but perhaps, in
time, users will warm to the availability of discounts and shopping
rewards brought about by these adverts.
Author: Damian Hicklin
IT Security Manager
ARM