GPS Hamburgers — Deal Or No Deal?
GPS creates new £345m advertising market
Author: Ian Grant
More than 40,000,000 people will be using their mobile phones to look up maps and routes by 2012, creating a search-based advertising market worth £354m, says market researcher Berg Insight.
It found that the market for map-related applications should grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 60% from 4,000,000 users in 2007 to 43,000,000 users in 2012. Revenue from subscriptions and advertisement is expected to reach £345m 2012 from £60m in 2007, a CAGR of 40%.
The adoption rate will be driven mainly by adding GPS-technology in smartphone handsets and bundling navigation and map content with mobile devices or service plans, said Andre Malm, telecom analyst at Berg Insight… read more about the advertising potential of GPS … LBS. Location Based Advertising at ComputerWeekly.
For the majority of my fellow Americans who never believe there is a world outside our borders, that’s about $700,000,000 USD (at least it is at today’s exchange rate, Lord knows what the slumping dollar will be worth tomorrow). It’s a lot of boxes of canolis in Tony Soprano terms.
We in the GPS business tend to think of GPS only as a tool to navigate, help save lives and to save the all-mighty operating dollar for business. It is all those things. But, as with this look into the future, GPS is also things many of us have not imagined.
Advertising has long been the engine of business. But today most forms of advertising have a glaring inadequacy … they are forced to use “peanut butter’ delivery systems. Decide upon an ad spend (the amount of peanut butter in the jar) and spread it as thin as possible (to get maximum coverage) across the media vehicle selected … radio spot, TV commercial, news paper or web site.
The web is making headway in offering a degree of localization … you can buy ads through companies like Google AdWords (see sidebar) which deliver ads based on a user’s perceived location from his/her IP address.
But what could possibly beat the “punch” of sending a special on today’s hamburger extravaganza at the moment a car with a family of hungry kids turns off the Interstate at lunch time? Talk about targeting! And useful, too. Can’t say how many times I have pulled off the highway wondering which of the totally unknown establishments ahead have anything good to offer. Quite frankly I would welcome something that differentiated a business from another … when I was nearby and it meant something to me. What do you think? Useful? Or too intrusive?