Sonic Notify: Taking Hyper Local Technology To New Levels of Local-ness
So I got the question the other day that was one of those deceptively simple questions: “So what do you think are the most interesting and exciting location based businesses you’ve seen out there recently?” And immediately a couple dozen companies popped into my mind, and I immediately started hedging, well there are a lot of them, which are interesting and exciting all for different reasons.
I happen to be particularly interested in the area of local and location based search and data, but since I had already talked a lot about companies dealing with data like PlaceIQ, Retailigence, Locu and HyperPublic, I instead ended up talking about an offering called Sonic Notify which was created by a NYC digital “ideas agency” called DenseBrain.
To grossly simplify it, Read more
Local Digital and Location Aware Advertising Ecosystem
Click image at right to enlarge
Waa-Waa… I want my own ad ecosystem chart, too!
If you’re in the digital display advertising world, you’ve no doubt referenced that awesome (and awesomely complex) LUMA partners chart of the display ad ecosystem. And you may not be aware, but Marc Theerman over at AdMeld did an equally awesome one for mobile display advertising, “paying homage” to the Luma Partners chart.
Well to rip off a good idea even further, I hacked one together for the local and location based advertising ecosystem… (damn I hope I don’t have to pay them royalties!).
Accurate? Yeah its ok, although some folks on the chart do many different things in different categories, so sometimes I just picked the bucket that I thought fit them best.
Complete? No way! It’s a big ecosystem, and a small chart. Many different players aren’t represented here… this is just a sampling… I tried to take some of the names that I know best and put them in the big major categories.
Missing something important? Well maybe. My background is generally around all things ‘location based’, so I scoured reliable sources like Borrell, BIA Kelsey and Greg Sterling’s incredible blog for much of the rest… and think I have most of the big stuff covered. But absolutely, please shoot me a note if I screwed something up big time or you have other suggestions: ben@locationawhere.com .
For those out there that can’t tell their Orange Soda from their Hot Potatos, hopefully this at least gives you a place to start!
PlaceIQ: Contextualizing Location For Advertisers
I’ve been involved with a company PlaceIQ in one way or another for the better part of a year now and as their product formally launches along with the Where2.0 conference this year, it seemed like as good a time as any to do a little blurb on what it is they do and why I think its so interesting.
You’re currently not going to get much information from the website yet, other the fact that they “transform location into context”. So what does that mean exactly?
Well it may help to back up and think about how context comes into play in the world in general. Read more
Harris Interactive & Placecast: Location Based Marketing Survey
Harris Interactive recently conducted a survey on behalf of Placecast digging into consumers’ preference and receptivity towards location based marketing and specifically receiving location triggered messages from businesses.
I think it is tough to read too much into these types of surveys, when you’re dealing with new technology and the general computing public because as Henry Ford said “ If you asked people what they wanted they would say ‘faster horses’”.
Nonetheless, here are some of the highlight that I could distill from the results:
- The big finding seems to be that once receiving a text alert from a merchant, 33% of respondents felt that they would be more likely to visit the physical store and 28% felt more likely to purchase the product promoted in the store. Read more
Mobile Location Data and the Advertising Targeting Opportunity
So I’ve been getting a re-education recently on the latest and greatest in digital ad networks and targeting. Things like behavioral targeting and re-targeting have been around with us for ages, even before the Doubleclick & Abacus Direct controversies of the dot com boom years over a decade ago. But for whatever reason, the whole hyper targeting and re targeting seems to have been placed back on the front burner of the industry, thanks in large part to the availability of inventory via advertising exchanges and the success that ad networks have seen in recent years… both of which have attracted a new category of entrants, including advertisers and agencies alike, back to the space.
So to those not in that industry here is the best I can do in summarizing what’s going on here.
The amount of display ad inventory available online is absolutely massive… far more than the supply of advertising dollars chasing it… so the price someone is willing to pay to serve any old advertisement to a random Internet user is pretty negligible. Meanwhile, the internet advertising industry long ago went down the path of selling itself as a data intensive, highly measurable and result oriented medium… and for better or worse is generally stuck with that description.
So… the name of the game nowadays is to not just serve anyone on the Internet any old ad and call it a day, but to serve a very specific group of people, sometimes a very specific ad, and measure what happened afterwards to see if it ‘worked’ in terms of driving clicks or purchases… rinsing and repeating until one gets the desired result or gives up and tries for a new result instead. The more highly correlated a given piece of information is with some desired activity like a click or purchase, the more valuable it is. Read more
Would the further localization of Groupon still work?
Ok, so its been a while since posting around here, there has been a lot going on in the LBS world, way too much to effectively catch up on here in a single post. I’ve been meaning to write about the whole background location coming on iPhone, Metacarta, Cityvoter, MyTown and Anttenna, and Socialight‘s new DIY LBS platform all of which seem pretty damn interesting and worthy of a closer look, but this whole time management thing keeps getting in the way.
So I’ll just dive back in with one of the ones that I have been wanting to investigate further, just because it seems to come up the most and I’ve been negligent in checking them out… it’s Groupon and what I’ve heard more than a few times about them growing into a big player in the future of location based marketing.
So I finally spent two minutes signing up for Groupon Read more
Placecast Match API
Ask a geo nerd, or Angelina Jolie, about where they are and they may geekily come back with the Latitude and Longitude of the location, but for the rest of us it’s a more imprecise description… “uh at the Mickey D’s next to the Exxon”. To McDonalds corporate that may be store #1245, to on campus students it may be the ‘ickdonalds by the dorms’ to area residents it may be the McDonalds by the university and to Google Maps it may be the business at 4151 North Central Expressway. All the same friggin place.
Now in the olden days when you just bought a printed foldable map this didn’t really matter much, but nowadays in the modern inter networked world of digital maps and folks creating a dizzying array of new services helping connect people with locations, it matters more. Now within a single stand alone application like say a TomTom navigation device there is probably not much thought put into what you name a place, but in the web2.0 world where interoperability and information sharing reign, everyone needs to know what location everyone else is talking about when someone is talking about the business at 4151 North Central Expressway.
SCVNGR: Woo hoo, now we can go buy some vowels!
Mobile location has always lent itself so well to real world real world guided tours and scavenger hunts. This summer I came across a company Plott.me which was looking to create a platform for anyone wishing to create their own guided city tour, and a few weeks back I chatted with another company Toura with a similar goal, but largely focused on creating similar experiences for museums and attractions, albeit with location as a secondary element.
But the one that seems to be getting the most attention is a Boston company called SCVNGR, thanks to a $4 million investment from Google Ventures, and word that they’re already generating over $1 million in revenue and are profitable in their first year of operation.
SCVNGR has created a platform that allows individuals or groups such as businesses and schools to create their own location based scavenger hunt games. Early customers are using the service for things like corporate team building, or on campuses for orientations and tours.
Two things that seem designed to help SCVNGR stand out are the super friendly, easy to use interface and also the broad cross section of devices supported meaning that that most anyone can set up a game and play. Although I spent 30 minutes playing around with the beta version for individuals, and had mixed feeling on it. Read more
ReserveX: Location Based Marketing and Selling More Tickets
I’ve always been interested in the theories and practices behind pricing and yield management… I am not much of a shopper, but when I do go shopping I frequently find myself wondering why things cost what they do, and the seemingly randomness to how sellers sometimes price things.
Forget about having me book an airline ticket, I’ll spend a week on Expedia with all those awesome options to work with… well what if I try these days, in to these airports within a 50 miles radius, with these times… now I wonder what will happen if I can try to arbitrage either two one ways, or throw in that trip to Denver next month trying to cross book that return with this departure using the same flight numbers… what fun!
So you can only imagine my excitement when I heard about what a company ReserveX was looking to do tying together location based marketing with yield management designed for tickets sellers. Read more
Placecast Teleconference Tomorrow: Mobile Technology and Retail
Placecast is holding another free webinar tomorrow titled Innovations in Retail: Using Mobile Technology to Drive Foot Traffic and Sales. I listened in on their earlier teleconference in May of this year and found it quite valuable. The conference is looking to bring together agencies and retailers to talk about some of the initiatives they have taken on in this space, what options are available, and why brand marketers should explore location based advertising. The panel includes a mix of folks including marketing agency Barkley, consumer products company The North Face, Primary Impact Research and of course Placecast itself.
The teleconference is free and open to the public and the panel will take live questions from listeners, but you must register first so leave a little extra time. It’s scheduled for 12:30 EST/9:30 PST so certainly worthwhile to listen in for a bit as you sit at your desk and enjoy lunch in New York or breakfast in the Bay Area.
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