Location Based Systems and the future of advertising
Written by Mihai Dragan on Monday, October 20th, 2008 ( Start discussion )
Tags: advertising, lbs, location based, targeting
The future of interactive advertising depends on context. Location can be important creating the context.
With AdSense it was text. With location based services is … of course … location. What are the benefits? Targeting, better understanding of the user and a better marketing message.
With advertising turning more and more to information rather than intrusive messaging location can be great delivering better info.
However, some issues must be solved in order to actually use this technology en masse.
First – there is the privacy.
Users have to be able to set which application can access their location, how far these application can go and how do they use this data. Easily.
Steps have been made in this direction by Yahoo, which launched Fire Eagle in august (interesting naming – I wonder how did they come up with it 
). Fire Eagle is a platform which helps its users manage their location across the web.
Some of the webapps already using it are Brightkite, Dash, Dipity and Pownce.
Second – there is the information we serve
Ok, we have this LBS thing, now what? Well for starters we have a bunch of Google Mashups we can use in one way or another.
Advertisers could also benefit from this. Why bother someone who is 100 miles away when you can just contact someone in front of one of your shops. Mix that with some bluetooth advertising and we can already start dreaming.
Third – too many platforms
The bad thing with the market economy is differentiation. Everybody wants to be the leader. Just joking. The competition is good for just about anything but it does bring some issues. Higher development costs for example. One has to develop for the Symbian, the iPhone OS, the Android, Windows Mobile. So many.
Wouldn’t it be great to have something that can help you develop for once and deliver to multiple platforms? That way you can engage many more users with lower costs. Oh, wait – there is Google Gears. Not only does this help solve the problem but it also connects web apps with mobile and others.
So the big question in the next few years of Interactive (both advertising and development) is “Where art thou?”.
