It is of no great surprise that the team at Spreed believes that location is an extremely large part of the mobile mix. Location targeting can be used for displaying more relevant content to users, but it can also be extremely effective as a form of targeting for advertisers.

Spreed has been on the forefront of location based advertising since the inception of the iPhone and it’s ubiquitous GPS technology. Not only have we developed a content platform that can detect someone’s location and actually re-skin the application based on where that users is (i.e. Metro News in English speaking Canada versus French spreaking Canada), but we have also included to-the-meter targeting of advertising in our CleverAds Ad platform.

We have seen a number of our publishers sell smart location based campaigns to their advertisers partners. Some of the most notorious examples being the targeting of large sports stadiums during professional games with deals for bars and restaurants right outside of the stadium. However, in most part we haven’t seen a large number of these campaigns run.

Mobile Marketer published a good article last week entitled, Have Marketers Forgotten About Geotargeted Mobile Advertising. We do not believe they have forgotten about it, we believe they haven’t even really tried it out yet. We are hoping that 2012 will bring a change in the trial and testing of location based campaigns.

The article by Mobile Marketer references Wilson Kerr, vice president of business development and sales at Unbound Commerce, Boston, who says  that location based campaigns haven’t been sold yet because, “ there is far more mobile ad inventory than ad campaigns booked. Mobile ad networks likely want to broaden the net they cast, rather than narrow it, to maximize impressions rendered.”

Essentially he is implying that mobile ad networks are just trying to fill as much inventory as possible, as we are still in the infancy of mobile advertising, without thinking about the conversions. This is a problem as generalized, untargeted campaigns are not going to translate into high CTR’s and in the infancy of mobile we need to prove campaign can really provide significant benefits over other mediums in order make mobile a permanent and potential dominant part of the advertising mix.

The above reason could be the issue for the lack of location based campaigns. But we would also like to throw in the possibility that the technology in not generally available in order to sell premium location based campaigns. The achilles heal of location based marketing has always been it’s inability to accurately predict a number of available impressions within a specific location.

Most ad platforms give publishers or advertisers the ability to target campaigns to the city or meter level. But very few can actually tell a sales representative how many available impressions they have to sell within any given location. Without understanding what you are selling it is hard to have confidence in your product and even harder for a potential advertising partner to understand what they are buying.

Spreed is proud to be one of the few, if not the only ad platform with the ability to report on trending available inventory within any given location. Because our ad platform is directly integrated into our analytics platform and the application or mobile site, we have significantly more information about a user and can actually use that information when targeting them with advertising. Location is just one example of information that we collect and can then utilize from an advertising perspective.

If location based advertising is going to become popular (and it should be as the conversions could be massive) more technology providers are going to have to provide detailed reporting on available inventory within a location. In the mean time our platform is ready to provide publishers and advertisers with that information.

If you have any questions about location based mobile advertising or location based reporting, to not hesitate to reach out to us via email/phone or leave a comment on this post. In the mean time we highly recommend reading the Mobile Marketer article linked to below.

Have Marketers Forgotten About Geotargeted Mobile Advertising 

Geotargeted mobile advertising is a hot commodity and a great way for marketers to not only drive in-store traffic, but make ads relevant to consumers. Although companies such as Best Buy and Ace Hardware are using location to their advantage, others are not.