Navteq annouced at CES today their new LBS advertising platform called LocationPoint. Check out the full press release, but here are the highlights:

- a turnkey way for device and app developers to make some money from advertising
- a new channel for advertisers and the opportunity for them to reach consumers when they’re making shopping and purchase decisions.
- map to include “storefront” information directly in the map (rather than jumping out to the web on connected devices?)
- ability for advertisers to ‘target’ users in the geographic vicinity
- includes “rich” ads like click to search, click to call, click to navigate and click to coupon

Garmin seems to be one of the first to use the platform, and the release seems to imply that the ad revenue may be subsidizing the free traffic capabilities offered in those models.

All of which sounds pretty interesting if you ask me, but the devil will of course be in the details. Reading between the lines in the release it sounds like they’re trying to manage expectations, and that their corporate publisher/OEM customers should only expect the revenue to amount to a small subsidy, at first anyway.

I certainly believe that a specialized mobile location aware ad network could be huge in the future (see earlier posts on this blog), and it will be interesting to see if Navteq is able to pull it off, or if it would be a better fit for someone like advertising.com. Microsoft’s MSN Direct group has seemingly been working on something similar, so 2009 could be a year of big developments on the mobile LBS ad network front.

View Comments to “Navteq announces LocationPoint LBS Ad Platform”

1. T. Anthony on July 25th, 2009 12:21 pm

   There is another site I think you guys will also like. It's about vitamins and herbal stuff. The Vitamin Shopper

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