Location is Next “Golden Nugget” for Carriers Google, Apple and Nokia have each done their best recently to advance the shift towards an ad-funded business model for mobile devices. But despite their considerable influence plenty still remains to be done before advertisers can fully take advantage of one of mobile’s key features – location. What’s stopping this happening? According to Lisa Peterson, a wireless industry consultant and founder of Peterson Mobility Solutions, it’s a combination of factors. Among them are fragmentation and lack of scale in the location ecosystem, a dearth of metrics to evaluate the value of location-based advertising (LBA) and concerns over privacy and advertising “clutter”. “Location is still fragmented, even here in the US, where there is a high penetration of GPS phones,” she said. “But not everyone carries a GPS phone and there are different methods for how that GPS is pulled out of the device. “There are different network architectures that the carriers have where there are capabilities of accessing the network to obtain the location of the device.” Peterson and co-author Rob Groot have just published a white paper on LBA in the US entitled “The Key to Unlocking the Most Value in the Mobile Advertising and Location-Based Services Markets”. Adverts without Clutter She said the report’s message is that location is needed if customers are to accept advertising on their mobiles. “If it’s not relevant to them they are going to see it as advertising clutter,” she said. “The screen size – the real estate – is much less on mobile than it is when you are looking at the internet and it will just become an annoyance factor.” In her report Peterson highlights the experience of NAVTEQ, which has found that click-through rates on ads is higher when location is used to add relevancy to them. She said the digital map company’s LocationPoint Advertising (LPA) service is a good example of the type of location-based marketing and advertising tactic that brands, advertisers, and agencies can leverage to reach their target audience at the appropriate time and place. “The message here is that traditional advertising agencies might just be getting used to mobile, but to have the greatest benefit in your ROI you should also leverage location,” she said. “It goes back to the concern that if you are sending out generic advertisements to mobile devices, are they going to get that much attention?” Better Profiling Essential However using location alone for mobile advertising and marketing is not enough, according to Peterson. “If I just use location, then I would maybe be delivering someone a coupon to a nearby bar and they might be on the wagon,” she said. So location has to be combined with more profile data on the consumer – details that are not necessarily available yet. Peterson said this makes putting out a mobile advertisement both confusing and complicated: “If I go to ad network providers and describe the target market I want to reach, do they even have enough data on that target market? “There is a lack of data in terms of how I reach a specific audience, which is why a lot of the ads we have seen are just about branding. There is not as much targeting going on.” Despite this uncertainty over consumer profile data, Peterson said location is starting to drive mobile advertisements in the US. She said companies like Loopt and uLocate understand their users. This enables them to go to advertisers and tell them, for instance, that the majority of their users are between 18 and 35. “So here’s an ideal target market. They know what they are searching on, what percentage of users are searching for coffee – so probably like coffee. Versus how many are going to movies,” she said. “So that data is being collected, but it’s out there in all these islands. It’s very good data to have but it has less value if it’s sitting in all these different islands.” Continued… (via Location is Next “Golden Nugget” for Carriers

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