I love the idea of localized advertising / marketing. Obviously benefits exist in localized advertising for advertisers, distributors, and consumers. Advertisers know they are reaching are much more targeted market while consumers get messages that may actually mean something to them.
I have written about this several times before including a post in my series about Google’s Strategy. As I discussed in ‘Media Madness‘ the possibilities for Google in localized advertising is supreme if they become a heavy player in IPTV distribution, which they will. Google has a partnership with Earthlink to provide free WiFi hotspots, with advertising of course. They also bought Dodgeball, which happens to be a way for friends to track each other via mobile phone.
Today I stumbled upon another very intriguing advertising model via AdJab about a company in London using GPS to send localized advertisements on buses.
“U.K.-based search engine Yell.com has partnered with AKQA to provide GPS-based ads in Central London. The ads will display local businesses within walking distance on interactive displays.”
U.K. buses get GPS-based ads – AdJab
Essentially the bus drives around the city displaying advertising for stores on the street it is driving down, thus giving passerbys reason to at least window shop. It’s brilliant.
Last week I read an article by Sharon Baltes in the Des Moines Business Record about a local marketing company using the same methodoligies.
“Johnson and Adam Kuperman, both 22-year-old West Des Moines natives, have created a marketing business that uses non-traditional methods of getting advertisements in the hands of people their age. Their main approach involves text-message marketing to cellular phones.”
The idea that Innovative Mediums is persuing is on-demand advertising over the SMS (text messaging) medium. They say,
“The people who opt in to receive the text message promotions customize their account online to control not only which businesses they receive messages from, but also how many messages they want to receive per day or week and blackout times they do not want to receive any messages.”
This is, I think, an excellent business model. People can choose the advertising they recieve from a directory and businesses can send out messages at any time to their database of users. And in a college town (Iowa City – U of I) nonetheless, bar patrons can sign up to receive promotions from their favorite watering hole. The possibilities are indeed limitless.
The maturity of ‘extreme localized advertising’ will grow with the adoption of mobile and social technologies. It’s a very young industry and it is nice to see small companies targeting very marketable niches.
technorati tags:advertising, mobile, marketing, google, innovative mediums, yell.com
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