You’re driving down the road listening to Pandora on your iPhone or Droid. You hear an ad promoting a new type of Starbucks coffee and briefly think about pulling over. The craving passes and you keep driving.
You hear the same ad three days later driving home from work, and again over the weekend. Finally, you’re driving to work Monday morning and don’t hear the ad at all, but you’re dying to try that new coffee. You stop at the drive through for a couple minutes and you’re on your way.
With traditional radio, you might measure the conversion through use of a coupon code. But what if someone forgets the code, or just doesn’t care about a 10% discount that much? With smart phones and GPS, there’s an entirely new way to connect ads, demographics, costs, and ROI: GPS conversions.
Maybe some sharp people at iAd or AdMob are working on this concept, but to my knowledge this is the first publication on the idea.
Each cell phone, via a serial number or app store account, is a unique identifier (unique key) to pair ads with individuals. Once ad platforms become integrated with operating systems, new opportunities will open up for marketers.
Currently, ad platforms only run within an app. Conversion measurement is rudimentary -- “tap on the banner to find out more”. Case studies have shown that conversion rates on mobile ads are pitifully low, and it’s easy to see why. Who wants to get distracted with filling out a form when you’re enjoying a game or music?
Once ad platforms are running in the background at all times, advertisers can set GPS coordinates and time limit triggers for conversion events. For example, Starbucks may know that 99% of drive through purchases take at least 30 seconds. Integrating with Google Maps, they could set a 100 foot radius around each of their stores.
The ad platform then stores a history of all GPS conversion ads you’ve heard or seen, such as:
|
Advertiser |
Ad |
Time Log (UNIX) |
Conversion Trigger |
|
Starbucks |
Pandora - Caramel Macchi... |
12,754,062,001 275,600,000 |
100ft, Lat 34.797665 Lon -92.413258, 30s |
The platform streams your live GPS location to an encrypted file and periodically checks this against your personalized ad log.
The advertiser would see the following actionable stats:
|
Ad |
Avg listens to conversion |
Avg days to conversion |
Conversion rate per listener |
|
Pandora - Caramel Macchi... |
8.2 |
6.5 |
0.32% |
Retargeting opportunities would allow brick and mortar retailers to target mobile ads only to phones that have been in the store before. The advertiser may also target segments based on customer loyalty (number of visits to brick and mortar locations):
One difficulty with such a technology may be a drain on battery life. With increases in battery capacity and some creative programming, those concerns will disappear.