background preloader

Advertising and LBS

Facebook Twitter

Adidas Death Star. If you're Adidas and you've got a Star Wars-inspired collection rolling out in January, what better way to promote it than by using social media? Adidas, however, has taken its online marketing initiative one step further, integrating Facebook and Google Maps to create the Star Wars Death Star Superlaser. The Adidas Originals application uses Facebook Connect to personalize the application experience, even granting you power over the Death Star control deck so you can blow up your Facebook friends' streets with help from Google Maps. The application experience is straight out of a Star Wars movie, and on the first go around you'll notice that your location is the first target of the superlaser.

After your street is blown to smithereens, however, you can target a friend's location by selecting any one of your Facebook friends to attack. This is where the Google Maps integration comes into play; you can even fine tune the laser's exact target using Street View if you so desire. Brightkite/Layar advertising. Location-based social network Brightkite announced this morning that it has added what it calls the first mobile Augmented Reality advertising for U.S. markets to its AR layer in the Layar augmented reality browser. Augmented Reality (AR) is a class of technologies that place data from the web on top of a camera view of the physical world. Layar is a browser for a wide variety of AR data layers, from real-estate listings to government data to messages posted to networks like Brightkite. It is available for Android phones and was available on the iPhone until it was withdrawn from the marketplace last week due to excessive crashes.

The Brightkite ads appear to be just for electronics retailer BestBuy so far, and are displayed as unique markers in your field of view when pointed towards one of the stores. Big round circles have been added to Brightkite camera-view annotations, designating the location of nearby BestBuy stores. Will consumers find the ads more useful than invasive? Augmented Reality Advertising Is Here. Augmented reality and geo-location really started to gain steam in 2009, and we expect to see even more developments in 2010. Geo-location in particular has really compelling opportunities when it comes to advertising. Already businesses are discovering the benefits they can gain by engaging and promoting services via Foursquare — it was really only a matter of time before bigger companies would start to take notice.

Today, Brightkite has launched what it calls the first augmented reality advertising solution in the U.S. Brightkite has partnered with Best Buy to run augmented reality advertisements within the Brightkite app for Android and the iPhone through the end of December.For the last few months, the company has allowed its users to see what their friends are doing around them — as well as photos of and comments about nearby places. Now the company is just extending that idea to its natural conclusion: advertising. Of course, it also has the potential to be annoying and invasive. Adlocal :: Your Location Based Mobile Advertising Utility :: Hom. LBSAdPlatform AdLocal enters America. Mobile advertising is poised to become a huge growth area, with research firm Kelsey Group seeing the market grow from just $160 million in 2008 to $3.1 billion in 2013. eMarketer projects mobile advertising spending in the US will balloon from $648 million in 2008 to over $3.3 billion in 2013.

While some believe search will account for the biggest chunk of the market, others expect geo-aware advertising, another way of bringing “relevant” ads to users, to have a bright future, too. This is where AdLocal, a location-based, self-service mobile ad platform that (re-)launched yesterday, comes in. Offered by Sunnyvale-based Cirius Technologies USA, the platform has been around in Japan since 2006, currently commanding the largest share of location-based advertising in Japan’s $1 billion [PDF] mobile ad space. AdLocal allows advertisers to manage their campaigns and publishers to add their mobile sites or applications by themselves through a Web-based dashboard. LBAd: A Lesson From Japan. Cirius Technologies US | Location based mobile marketing special. Here, There, and Everywhere - destinationCRM.com. Talk about being in the right place at the right time: When Natasha Léger debuted LBx Journal, the publication she cofounded, at last May’s Where 2.0 conference, she thought of that first issue as a much-needed solution to a long-unaddressed problem—delivering, as she puts it, “location in the language of business.”

Location-specific data is a relatively new concept, and the full potential of its enterprise value remains unclear, but the industry has rallied around the statistic that perhaps 80 percent of company data is location-oriented. Even so, traditional geographic information systems (GIS) have been expensive and proprietary, reserved primarily for companies with big budgets or mandatory location-based needs (e.g., utilities or communication companies). Despite the value of location data, GIS has rarely been integrated with business systems such as CRM or enterprise resource planning (ERP).

Hitting Consumers Where They Live (and Do Everything Else) Placecast. Advertising - North Face Campaign Sends Texts When Shoppers Near. Stowe Boyd Geo-Fencing: The Future Of Advertising. We are starting to see the outlines of a revolution in geolocational, text-messaging advertising. The North Face is one of the leaders in so-called ‘geo-fencing’ advertising, where ‘geo-fences’ are created within a certain distance from physical stores, and when people pass inside those fences — and if they have opted in to advertising from the company — they receive promotional text messages: - Claire Cain Miller, Take a Step Closer for an Invitation to ShopThe North Face’s new campaign, which starts this month, is its first to single out customers depending on where they are physically.The campaign was created by Placecast, a location-based mobile ad company in San Francisco.

It uses a practice called geo-fencing, which draws a virtual perimeter around a particular location. When someone steps into the geo-fenced area, a text message is sent, but only if consumers have opted in to receive messages. Imagine the messaging from Subway, Starbucks, or PF Chiangs. Location 101: breaking down the market for location-based apps |

[People have got location all wrong, argues guest blogger Jane Sales, co-creator of flook. Rather than treating the market for location-based applications as a single monolithic entity, Jane breaks it down into use-case-driven segments and makes it concrete by showing the key iPhone applications in each segment.] As the author of a location-based application, I get into many discussions with fellow technologists about the future of the consumer location-based application space. Which app is going to win – MyTown, Foursquare, Urbanspoon, Yelp or perhaps flook? Many of my conversation partners believe that there will be one single winning application – one, and only one, location-based application that people install on their iPhone, iPad or Symbian device. This is a technology-based argument – applications are described as competitive if they use the device’s GPS silicon to determine location.

Joking aside, the point I am making is ‘it’s not about the GPS, stupid!’. 1. 2. 3. 4. 2. 3. NowSpots - Local ads that work. Nowspots. Local. Local.com Buys Domain Advertising Company OCTANE360 For Up To $1. Local business directory and search engine Local.com this morning announced the acquisition of the assets of OCTANE360, a technology startup based out of Los Angeles that provides domain-based local advertising solutions to small businesses, domain portfolio owners, agencies and channel partners. Under the terms of the agreement, Local.com is paying $5 million in cash and stock with an earnout of up to $5.9 million if certain performance criteria are met in the two-year period following the closing. OCTANE360 will become a wholly-owned division of Local.com Corporation. Founded in 2008, OCTANE360 offers a number of services to its client base, which consists mostly of small businesses and agencies, on a direct, wholesale or private label basis.

Following the acquisition, OCTANE360 will be managed within Local.com’s Sales & Ad Services business unit, and its products and services will be utilized by the company’s Owned & Operated and Network business units. OCTANE360: Create, Expand, Reach, Profit! POIdo. POIdo makes location-based advertisers compete for your attention. POIdo is one of 20 promising startups included in the MobileBeat 2010 Startup Competition and is in the running for one of two coveted Tesla Awards. POIdo, one of a number of location-based advertising startups, is putting a new spin on the concept. The Moscow-based company is able to target advertisements at users based on their exact locations, the context of them being there, and their recent behavior in other applications on their phones.

A pay-per-action advertising platform, POIdo is able to deliver ads when mobile users happen to approach a certain virtual billboard, or when they search for specific addresses that happen to be nearby. Advertisers compete for a limited amount of ad slots for every given location in an auction-based model online so that mobile users don’t feel overwhelmed or spammed. According to POIdo, location-based ads can convert as many as 20 percent of people who see them into customers. CocaCola Summer Map. Geotoko | Geotoko. Run Multiple Location-Based Marketing Campaigns with One Cool App [INVITES] Mashable’s Spark of Genius series highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, see details here.

The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. Name: Geotoko Quick Pitch: Geotoko is a simple, powerful platform for businesses, brands and agencies to run location-based contests and sweepstakes around checkins from a range of apps. Genius Idea: So, your company or agency wants to get into location-based marketing. You can create your campaign using multiple apps, manage the rewards you dish out to users and drive foot traffic to locations all from Geotoko's dashboard.

In addition, the company provides the all-important metrics: real-time analytics to measure your campaign's performance and ROI, customers' behavior, and how various locations and services perform. Here's what a sample campaign might look like: On the user side, there have been quite a few attempts to consolidate checkins for more than one app at a time. Yahoo Japan scoops up location-based mobile ad firm Cirius.

Yahoo Japan has acquired location-based mobile ad firm Cirius Technologies. Cirius is based in Tokyo and operates AdLocal, a service that targets consumers with ads. It takes into account the physical location of the users via global positioning system (GPS), cell phone identification, map coordinates and other data. Cirius has about 38 employees. After the acquisition, AdLocal will close its U.S. office in San Francisco, Calif. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Gen Miyazawa, 28, founded Cirius in 2004. [Photo: Mobile Planet TV] TappLocal - Hyperlocal Mobile Advertising. TappLocal Is A Platform For Foursquare-Like Deals Beyond Foursquare.

If you’ve used Foursquare, you’ve likely seen the little badge that appears in the corner of your mobile phone’s screen when a deal is nearby. It’s a good way to alert someone to a location-based offer, and it seems to be working well for the company. A new startup, TappLocal wants to take that idea and expand upon it to create a new location-based ad network.

The way this works is that TappLocal uses their backend to create a geofence around certain partner venues. When a user crosses that boundary and happens to be using one of the partner apps, a deal indicator will pop-up. A quick click on this area will open a larger area explaining exactly what the deal is. Simply click one more time to verify you wish to use the deal, show it to the store that it’s valid at, and you’re good to go. And it’s not just these proximity deals that TappLocal is working on. Kasel is quick to note that they don’t want to spam users.