Partner Article

Talking Business: Location, location, location

With Gary Jobe, digital director, Cravens in association with Vodafone and CCS.

I’ve given a number of social media talks for students and clients recently, as well as writing about augmented reality in various publications, and I am excited to start seeing the two approaches merging and providing useful applications and utilities for businesses.

Across 2009, we have seen a number of location-aware applications being developed and will start seeing these executions maturing during 2010 and beyond. As the adoption of smart phones increases, the opportunities to develop engaging location-based applications is growing and the experience of regularly tracking, finding and connecting will soon become normal practice.

Loopt, a location-based social sharing service, has taken the logical next step for its application. After partnering with Mobile Spinach, the Loopt service on the iPhone has been developed to include location-based advertising. Loopt now provides its users with special offers and discounts from businesses that are near their specific location, for example, user’s service can get a discount by showing an alert message to a restaurant.

Sophisticated developments such as this will actually give advertising partners an amazing new vehicle for influencing sales. For instance, a coffee shop which has a drop in sales between certain times of the day could time its discounted ads to attract more trade at these times or it could even offer “2 for 1” deals and loyalty schemes.

I would predict that with more people using location-aware smartphones, this could be the next phenomenon. Location-based ads enable a degree of precision in audience targeting that’s rarely been possible before, and this could mean lucrative returns for companies. This will obviously create a few privacy worries, but benefits could outweigh these concerns. As there will be numerous ads anyway, they might as well be ads that contain content you’re interested in.

Apple recently announced that it was asking developers to strip location-based ads from its apps. This, coupled with its purchase of a wireless company, is a strong indicator they are moving into this space.

So, as the phone market matures the applications and their uses will follow suit and start to provide new channels and ways to engage with consumers and other business users.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .