The San Jose Business Journal’s recent “unscientific” study reported that significant number of their readers weren’t receptive to location-based mobile ads when the sharing of their location wasn’t voluntary. About 39% of readers “hate it,” and others prefer to be “off the radar” altogether, voicing concerns about privacy and sharing personal information without their explicit permission.
Exactly. In contrast, consumers who opt-in to services that provide them with valuable offers and information, without broadcasting their location to others, are actually comfortable sharing some of their location information. Data from studies that Placecast has done with consumers in location-based mobile programs with retail brands shows receptivity to sharing location when users have voluntarily given permission and deemed it useful. When users choose to opt-in and agree to share their location, the exchange of value becomes positive—about 80% of users we surveyed responded favorably to using their location to increase relevance for text alert offers and information.
For the full SJ Business Journal article, click here:
Few in poll like location-based mobile ads
Last week, eMarketer presented a comprehensive look at our data related to the rising interest in mobile marketing offers among parents, and concluded that “While the mobile market will be shifting toward more sophisticated forms of advertising as smartphone penetration increases, with feature phones currently in the hands of 69% of US subscribers, according to Nielsen, SMS campaigns still have the biggest reach.” eMarketer also highlighted the increased interest in the types of coupons and promotions among parents looking to save money.
Click here to read the full article:
Targeting Parents with Mobile Alerts
Following up on our recent webinar on location and mobile marketing, we released part two of our findings with Harris Interactive this week. Not surprisingly, receptivity to location-based mobile communications is scaling quickly when this type of marketing appropriated for usefulness, convenience, and relevance—most notably with consumers for whom time and resources are at a premium: parents.
Women, especially between the ages of 35-54, are rapidly embracing mobile phones as a way to organize and simplify their lives, and both moms and dads tend to be more in tune with mobile promotions, having shown a higher response in signing up for deals through sites like Groupon.
The response to queries about the importance of cell phones increased notably for users with children in a household, which means that brands not yet embracing location-based SMS marketing have opportunities to create strategic programs to deliver promotions and information to this demographic when and where this content is needed. And while apps with location components continue to grow and be helpful, text messaging scales more quickly in terms of importance to consumers and ease of use when juggling the logistics surrounding family, school, work, and activities.
For the full report, please visit our research portal.
Placecast teamed up with Mobile Marketer this week to present How Mobile Text Alerts and Location Affect Consumer Retail Behavior, a webinar outlining our findings from the research we conducted with the Harris Poll and directly with participants in ShopAlerts programs we created for REI, Sonic, The North Face, and American Eagle Outfitters. Following up on our recent press release about our Harris Interactive Data findings, this webinar offered a forum for discussion and exchange with brands and mobile marketers around lessons learned and emerging best practices for location-based programs. We also covered location-based mobile recruitment strategies and methods for increasing the relevancy of messages and measuring purchase behavior.
With texting and mobile devices becoming a primary mode of communication across all audiences, from teens and busy parents to savvy shoppers, there is growing consumer interest in receiving specific promotions and mobile content tied to interests and location. While consumers cited special offers and promotions as most appealing, a significant percentage also noted that even if they didn’t purchase an exact item promoted in a message, text alerts served as reminders to visit the brand’s store/website for other items and content, helping to increase awareness, build brand loyalty, and stimulate engagement.
The full archived webinar can be accessed here
For a copy of the webinar deck in PDF format, email us at webinar@placecast.net
Internet Retailer’s article about Placecast’s research with Harris Interactive regarding the impact of location-based mobile marketing…
“Location-based mobile alerts have led a third of women 18 to 34 to visit a store, according to a recent survey. And 27% of that demographic said that mobile messages have impacted their decision to buy in a physical store.
The poll, conducted from May 17 to19, surveyed 2,046 U.S. adults 18 and older, including 1,710 who own a cell phone and/or a smartphone. It was conducted by Harris Interactive and commissioned by location-based ad company Placecast. It studied opt-in mobile marketing messages only….”
Click here to read the full article:
Mobile alerts get young women into stores—where some even buy
Today Placecast announced the release of our second wave of research conducted by Harris Interactive that dives deeper into consumer receptivity to opt-in mobile marketing and the potential impact for retailers. Overall, consumer receptivity to opt-in mobile marketing is growing, as is its ability to increase intent to visit stores. One-third of Americans who currently have signed up for mobile marketing alerts indicate that such services impact their decision to go into stores and 27% report that mobile programs have impacted their decision to buy products in physical retail locations. (Please click here to request more information covered in this study).
During the summer of 2009, we conducted the first survey on location-based mobile marketing and advertising, which forms the baseline for this research. Since that first survey, we have seen that overall consumer interest in such programs increased with ‘somewhat interested’ consumers growing by 2 percent to 28% of all cell phone owners. As in the first survey, interest is most pronounced among the youngest cell phone owners: 42% of those ages 18–34 are at least somewhat interested. Interest grew 6 points to 40% among women ages 18–34 from the survey conducted in 2009. Interest levels between men and women are now about equal overall.
Consumers vote with their stomachs
Groceries (68%), national restaurant chains (64%), and fast-food items (50%) took three of the top four most popular segments for those who are at least somewhat receptive to overall opt-in mobile marketing, with a host of other categories also seeing strong interest. 
Women skewed higher than men when it came to interest in offers/promotions for groceries and apparel, while men skewed higher in interest for electronics and sporting goods products:
Texting significantly more valued than app-based services
One of the most interesting data points in this study across all cell phone owners is the importance of texting: it is still an overwhelmingly popular activity on mobile vs. other activities. An average of 40% of all cell phone owners say that texting is “extremely” or “very important” to them. Even with the buzz of services like Foursquare and Gowalla, only 7% of men and 3% of women showed the same level of interest in these types of social networks.
With check-in services only available on smart phones (which comprise roughly 21% of all mobile phones in the U.S.), reach for marketers through these platforms is still a question. Furthermore, both consumers and marketers see texting as similar mechanisms to email, which has made a substantial impact on purchase behavior— both online and in brick-and-mortar stores. Incorporating location—the ability to make messages even more relevant based on where users are and when they are there—is consistently seen as a valuable service by consumers and is easy for marketers to execute at scale.
Methodology
This survey was conducted online within the United States by Harris Interactive on behalf of Placecast from May 17–19, 2010 among 2,046 U.S. adults ages 18+, of whom 1,710 own a cell phone and/or a smartphone. For complete survey methodology, including weighting variables, please contact us here.
As check-in and other location apps and services get a lot of press, once again the possibility of successfully tapping the $23 billion local ad market using mobile is becoming a very real opportunity. Location is emerging as the key to relevance on mobile, but as both consumers and small businesses are finding, location relevance at scale is much more difficult than a simple click to check in. Just because a smartphone has a GPS on it doesn’t mean that whatever marketing a user receives on it is automatically relevant (not to mention trying to run these programs with the 193 million Americans using feature phones).
Consistently delivering location relevance at scale on mobile requires the ability to solve for several different challenges simultaneously, most notably:
• Correct location data – as our prior post points out, this is a somewhat arcane plumbing issue, but one that is the first critical piece in being able to return relevant content and offers to a user based on place and time. And on mobile, nothing is worse than having your phone point you to something nearby, only to find that the business no longer exists or has moved.
• Manage content attached to locations – making decisions on the fly about what relevant content or advertising to send a consumer based on place and time requires having the updated content to deliver. A robust content management system specifically focused on managing locations can pull user reviews and pictures, venue information, events nearby, discount or coupon codes tied to a specific location, check-ins and even traffic or weather to make the experience relevant.
• Campaign management for location – for any mobile marketing program to be relevant, it must deliver authenticated geo-targeting (to ensure that a consumer doesn’t check-in from across town), frequency capping (so that a user never sees the same ad twice), and even CRM or behavioral targeting data dynamically mapped into a marketing message or ad unit (think of adding the nearest retail location or a favorite product category automatically to a message sent by a brand) – as part of each and every program.
When any one (or more) of these pieces are missing from a solution, location relevance falls apart. And while an irrelevant Starbucks ad may simply be annoying, for a sole proprietor with a small marketing budget, the inability to correctly attach and delivery their marketing dollars to a nearby user who is interested is a non-starter.
The good news is that small businesses are more rapidly embracing location-based tools, and the potential is very real. Lots of recent data indicates that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are crafting location-oriented offerings: more than 90% are also on Facebook and Twitter, 80% have claimed their Google Place Page, 40% use Yahoo Local, and almost 20% use Microsoft’s Bing Maps for marketing outreach. And Google has certainly taken note, rebranding its local business center as Places and offering small businesses $25 fixed price listings. Can Twitter be far behind, now that they are publishing venues with each tweet? Certainly, there is an opportunity for them to copy Google’s Place Pages and aggregate location-based inventory for both monetization and search capabilities.
From a consumer perspective, there is no doubt that that the interest level is high. Some of Yelp’s iPhone stats are astonishing when it comes to location, including half a million calls and a million point-to-point directions to local businesses generated directly from the iPhone App. A next major move we can expect to see is mobile developers aggregating continuously-updated and correct location content from many different sources to create a genuinely relevant experience for consumers. This and the tools described above create the tipping point for local marketing dollars to flow into the location-based space.
For more interesting reading on this topic, check out:
Twitter: The Local Monetization Strategy
Foursquare’s Starbucks Mistake: Five Ways Foursquare Advertising Is Getting Less Interesting
Only 10% of Businesses Would Pay for Foursquare: Survey
Yelp Stats Show iPhone App Usage Staggeringly Deeper Than Website
The tech trades are beginning to fill with treatises and musings on the topic of location data. From the emerging silos between location data providers (Location 2012: Death Of The Information Silos) to calls for an Open Database of Places, what’s clear is that making the mobile experience relevant for where a consumer is and when they are there is vastly more difficult than just getting a GPS fix from a phone.
Take for example the silos problem – in essence, the creation of walled location data-gardens with no interoperability across location-based services. “Why doesn’t Plancast know that I’ve been to Starbucks on Tripit…” and other more humorous views on the topic highlight the problems that result from attempting to aggregate different location-based services into a unified consumer experience in the physical world. While it should be simple, the many different ways of expressing places in the world make this a very complicated problem.
Reviews on Yelp!, social plans on Plancast, rewards on Foursquare, my fan pages on Facebook and the folks I’m following on Twitter—all referring loosely to the same places (but with different ways of referring to those places)—should be brought together in a way that works seamlessly and is updated in real time on my phone… Yet a simple example from New York City highlights one of the many problems with location data and actually doing this: “1 Bryant Park”, “1095 Avenue of the Americas,” and “Aureole Restaurant – 135 W. 42nd Street” are all in the same building, but which one do I check-into? Alternatively, if Starbucks wants to attach a mobile coupon or offer to a store in this building, they need to associate it correctly with that store location, regardless of how it is referred to across many different applications (from Foursquare to Facebook to Plancast), which may all have a different ways of identifying this particular location.
The oft-touted solution to this problem is the creation of a universal database of places to which all LBS companies can contribute. While this altruistic approach makes sense in theory, unfortunately location data is not like open-source software: not everyone participating in the location ecosystem will benefit. Smaller companies with unique location data do not get anything out of sharing it—and the ambition of some of the larger players in our space pushing their unique ID systems is an attempt at locking developers into their content so that we all have to work through them for monetization.
So until the ideal universal database emerges, Placecast has taken a different approach. We’ve opened access to our platform to share tools for cleaning and managing location data (which solve the 1 Bryant Park and Starbucks problems described above) through our free MatchAPI solution. As part of MatchAPI, publishers and developers can share their location data with one another by simply matching their IDs—not giving away their unique content.
At the end of the day, what we should all be focused on is building great experiences and monetizing them—not hoarding location data. The way to achieve this is by reducing the friction that stands in the way of sharing location data, so that advertisers from large brands to neighborhood stores can deliver marketing to their customers on their phones. Sharing IDs is a simple first step.
For more interesting reading on this topic, check out:
Why check-ins and like buttons will change the local landscape by Tyler Bell
http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/05/check-ins-like-buttons-will-ch.html
Location 2012: Death Of The Information Silos by Robert Scoble in Techcrunch:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/03/location-2012/
It’s Time For An Open Database Of Places by Erik Schoenfeld also in Techcrunch
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/17/open-database-places/
Eddy’s Sofa And The Nightmare Of A Single Global Places Register posted by Gary Gale
http://opengeodata.org/eddys-sofa-and-the-nightmare-of-a-single-glob
Placecast is excited to announce that the company has been named a Webby Award Official Honoree. The 14th Annual Webby Awards received nearly 10,000 entries from all 50 states and over 60 countries worldwide. The Webby Awards are considered the Internet’s most respected symbol of success. As an Honoree in the “Best Use of GPS or Location Technology” category, Placecast remains a leader in the field, a company whose work has included creating the concept and phrase “geo-fence marketing.”
Webby Award winners are chosen by the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, a global organization whose members include David Bowie, Harvey Weinstein, Arianna Huffington, Matt Groening, Internet inventor Vinton Cerf, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson, and R/GA Chairman and CEO Bob Greenberg.
Past Webby Award Winners have included industry leaders such as Amazon.com, eBay, Yahoo!, iTunes, Google, FedEx, BBC News, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, NPR, Salon Magazine, Facebook, Meetup, Wikipedia, Flickr, ESPN, Comedy Central, PBS and The Onion News Network.
“Retailers are looking for innovative ways to use emerging forms of technology to drive in-store traffic. Our ShopAlerts service is an excellent example of mobile marketing and advertising driving ROI in an innovative and relevant way for consumers and the brands they love,” says Alistair Goodman, CEO of Placecast.
Being named a Webby Award Official Honoree is the fifth award distinction that Placecast has won this year.
The company won The BIG Minute of Innovation, led by the San Francisco Bay Area Interactive Group (SFBIG), a non-profit professional association dedicated to championing innovation in digital marketing, and sponsored by dmg world media. Placecast was selected as number one out of fifteen companies presenting for their location-based mobile marketing service.
Placecast’s ShopAlerts service took home the top prize for innovation given by the National Retail Federation, the 2010 RACie award, as the company showed that consumers and brands like the North Face, Sonic and American Eagle are embracing opt-in location-based mobile marketing.
Additionally, ShopAlerts was selected as a finalist in the 2010 Global Mobile Awards announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain earlier this year. Most recently, Placecast was named a CTIA E-Tech Award finalist in the category of Enterprise & Vertical Market Solution – Mobile Marketing or Advertising.
Today, we announced the release of a report titled “Retail Goes Mobile: Finding New Consumer Connections Through Mobile Devices” by Kathryn Koegel, President of Primary Impact Research. The report focuses on the latest research on mobile marketing within the retail sector.
This report reflects the next installment of our research, focused on helping marketers navigate the mobile landscape and develop strategies for connecting with consumers. This report which pulls together a cross-section of insights from the Harris Poll, Nielsen, comScore and TNS, as well as research from our own mobile programs, paints an exciting picture about the opportunity for mobile marketing in 2010.
With Apple’s recent announcements of the iPad and iAd, marketers everywhere are now more focused than ever on mobile. For retailers in particular, 2010 is clearly the year that they are universally testing this medium because of the uniquely personal, always on characteristics of the phone. From location-based SMS, WAP banners and text links, branded apps or ads in applications, retailers are now recognizing the power that the mobile device can have in driving traffic into physical stores.
We’ve been learning through our experience with brands and our consumer research, that place and time are a powerful predictor of consumer intent. As consumers, where we are and when we’re there says a lot about what we are interested in. Combining mobile and location can enable marketers to deliver a message when the consumer is in the mindset to take action: in research we conducted through the holiday season with three brands, 65% of consumers that opted-in to follow a brand made a purchase as a result of receiving messages based on place and time. In essence, location and time are the physical manifestation of purchase intent.
With 224 million mobile users engaged in texting, SMS has emerged as “the only form of mobile marketing to reach the entire mobile universe.” According to a Harris Poll consumer survey conducted on behalf of Placecast, 45% of 18-34 year-olds and 35% of 35-44 year olds were interested in receiving opt-in mobile alerts.
“Mobile phones now have consumer penetration rates that surpass the Internet, and marketers need to grasp the implications of ‘go-anywhere media,’ which is what mobile phones represent,” says Kathryn Koegel, who lead this research project. “Consumers use their phones to do everything from research products to check competitor retail pricing – even from within store locations,” she continues.
The full “Retail Goes Mobile” report is available here.
