Will next year be "the year of location aware?"

Oct 30, 2009 by

Previously I posted about the truly pitiful click through rates for ads that are seen on the iPhone – 0.3%. Not good news for marketers as the UK’s OFCOM (the equivalent of the FCC), found that mobiles, and not the Internet via PCs, is now the second most essential media for 16-24 year olds.

A piece of research by digital map provider NAVTEQ (via Marketing Charts) however is pointing a way forward for brands by trumpeting “The Year of Location Aware.” The theory is – serve someone up a random ad on a tiny smartphone screen, or spam them with some SMS marketing and they’ll tell you where to go.

However, if the advertising “grabs the attention of a consumer near the point of purchase”, according to NAVTEQ’s David Klein, the reaction might be different.

Though they clearly have a vested interest in the results, NAVTEQ carried out a study that showed that 72% of consumers found location based ads to be “acceptable” (whatever that means), but 19% who recalled seeing them would click through for info on what’s nearby, and that is certainly a whole lot better than 0.3%.

Though location based apps, for example one by UK retailer Tesco that drills down to where you can find what products on which shelves in the supermarket aisle, are taking off, I’m less sure about location based networks – at least here in the UK.

Recently, my fellow digital Cow, Louise pointed me to this article on the limitations of location based social networks despite the hype.

Factors limiting their growth include users being slow to join up, businesses needing better incentives to get on board, the technology being still in its early stages, and – this for most people I’ve talked to is the deciding factor – a reluctance to be tracked both by brands and by people who you might not want to be seen by.

Indeed, I remember when one of the earlier location based networks, Brightkite, came out, a female Twitter friend of mine in the States joked that this would be the perfect ‘stalkers toolkit’, hence she was giving it a miss.

Image – Foursquare by dpstyles

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2 Comments

  1. Dirk Singer
    October 31, 2009

    Thanks Ben! And as to what this new site is, it was purpose designed in April by my colleagues here in Cape Town and I left it dormant. I’ll quickly post this weekend why I’ve activated it now as the old thisisherd feed has been redirected here.

  2. Ben Kunz
    October 30, 2009

    Mobile is the Gordian Knot of marketing. One one hand, it holds the promise to connect with people in their hands, at their location, at the exact moment they come near your brand. On the other hand, the mobile channel is used by consumers to do what they damn well please, and they’ll ignore you very much. Apples has 85,000 apps? That’s 85,000 ways to ignore the Google search engine ads that typically crowd your search. Egads. The tangle of promise-of-reward tied up in no-one-is-paying-attention would give Alexander the Great a headache.

    All of this hyperbole reminds me of a business plan from a major handset maker (whose brand name starts with “M”), about sending targeting advertising to consumers as they approached malls and retail stores. I saw it in a consulting role, and was impressed by the financial forecasts. Huge money. Would take over the market. Would rapidly change consumer behavior.

    Oh yes. The year I saw that plan was 1999.

    (Nifty new blog, by the way. You should screw up in IT more often…)