I've been seeing a growth in the marketing of location-based services so I decided to look into it more. If you want to learn more about LBS, go to the Creativity Software website, which has a good overview of location based services.
One thing that the mobile operators have as an advantage (with regard to the over-the-top players) is that they know your location. Now, someone could map every wifi connection in the world as per something similar on this website, but clearly there will be more coverage and more accuracy with a mobile operator. And another advantage is that the mobile operators know how to bill you, which is important since LBS is worth monetizing.
Two of the fist and best known LBS apps are fleet management tracking and "family finder," which helps you keep track of where your children are. According to Creativity Software, people are willing to pay at least $1 ARPU/month for this, which makes these kinds of apps very appealing and which make for an easy return on investment for the mobile operator. Clearly, then, upping the take rate of these family finder apps to yield a higher subscriber update would be an excellent marketing campaign for a mobile operator.
I also view location-based mobile advertising as a huge growth area for location-based services. If you can get an ad to a mobile phone that is relevant to the location of the phone, the person may be more apt to take advantage of that ad.
This concept is conveyed well in the Dialogic corporate video and I put a snapshot of that above. The restaurant ad pops up as someone is watching a soccer game near the restaurant. Then when they click on the ad, the next screen shows up.
If the restaurant had a special and wanted to "advertise" it, a basic way of course would be to advertise it in the newspaper. But instead of doing this, what if they made a deal to advertise it to a phone near the location? The ad could be clickable to a voice call or a website to set up a dinner reservation as well (which is how this video showed it). There is a digital advertising ecosystem that could make this happen. I would guess that within a few years this will be fairly commonplace.
