David Murphy, editor of Mobile Marketing Magazine, muses on the changes location awareness is bringing to the mobile world.
I’ve been thinking about location-based services lately, and the more I think about them, the more I think their time may finally have come. If you’ve seen the sci-fi movie Minority Report, you may recall the scene in which Tom Cruise enters a shopping arcade and is bombarded with personalised offers, with sensors in the arcade identifying him by his iris, as I recall. Interestingly enough, by the time the film was released in 2002, it was already two years since a company called ZagMe had tried to do something similar in the real world at the Bluewater shopping centre, though in this deployment, the medium was text and the messages didn’t come quite so thick and fast.
ZagMe never quite caught on, but ever since, companies have been trying to tap into the fact that people usually have their phone with them, and that to a certain degree at least, you can identify where they are, with reference to their nearest mobile network cell site. In fact, with more people now owning GPS-enabled smartphones, brands can target people much more accurately, to within a few metres if they wish.
Foursquare rewards
This is playing out in several ways. If you’re a foursquare enthusiast, you will know that you can earn rewards by visiting places and telling foursquare that you are there by “checking in” on your mobile. Slowly but surely, brands are waking up to the potential of this idea. It’s hardly a hotbed of activity just now, but in the UK, for example, each Wednesday, Dominos Pizza is offering the “Mayor” of each of its outlets (that’s the person with the most checkins there in the past week), a free small pizza, while any foursquare user who checks in and spends over £10 gets a free garlic pizza bread. Dominos doesn’t even have seats; it’s a takeaway-only business, so the firm is using the foursquare tie-up to drive its collections business.
There’s also some interesting stuff happening on mobile. Geocast sells location-based advertising inventory for a number of publishers on their mobile properties. As an advertiser, you can say you only want your ads to be seen by people when they come within a certain distance, that you can specify, of one of your stores, or indeed, of one of your competitor’s stores. The firm currently has around 10,000 advertisers, and while many are small businesses, it says it expects bigger brands to come on board as the agencies that advise them get their heads round the idea of using mobile advertising to drive footfall into stores, rather than just driving traffic to their mobile internet sites.
Another company, Vouchercloud, launched an iPhone app in February, offering localised money-off vouchers. The app has so far been downloaded almost 600,000 times, and users have downloaded 250,000 coupons. Because the company behind Vouchercloud has some previous, distributing large, print-based voucher books in cities up and down the UK, it has managed to get some big brands, including Pizza Hut, Carluccio’s and Prezzo on board. It quotes redemption rates for one Pizza Hut 2-for-1 offer of 9 per cent.
Perfect storm
It seems to me like a perfect storm: more consumers now have GPS-enabled smartphones and are comfortable with the idea of downloading apps on their phone and browsing the mobile web – 16m of us did so in December. We’ve also, in these cash-strapped times, become a nation of voucher-junkies. And while it’s fair to say that the majority of brands still don’t get the potential of location-based services, it’s my belief that that’s all going to change before the year is out.
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