On a recent family vacation to San Francisco, I tried out several location-aware applications on my new 3G iPhone. My experiences left me enthusiastic about location-based services and pondering the implications for advertising and marketing.
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On a recent family vacation to San Francisco, I tried out several location-aware applications on my new 3G iPhone. My experiences left me enthusiastic about location-based services and pondering the implications for advertising and marketing. I was struck not only by how convenient it is to have access to maps and directions, but how much richer my travel experience became by having access to otherwise invisible information about the places I visited.

Much of this information was created by other people in the form of restaurant reviews, recommendations and heretofore well-kept secrets. Using Urban Spoon's iPhone application, for example, I was able not only to find a coffee shop close to my hotel, but I learned that one of the nearby options was distinctive. It was around the corner and down an alley from a more conveniently located Starbucks, and I never would have discovered it without the combination of social media and location application.

I had similar experiences with restaurants, activities and retailers using applications like Yelp and Where. And the iPhone's map feature and location-tracking capabilities helped keep me oriented as I dragged three sometimes reluctant kids up and down hills to find these treasures.

Yet another dimension of location-based services involves not just finding places and recommendations, but people as well. Services like Where's Buddy Beacon, Brightkite and Loopt can alert you whenever your friends are nearby. Naturally, there are privacy concerns aplenty with these types of services, but there is undeniable utility in being able to find or be found by the people you want to be with, even if it's only in aggregate. In San Francisco, Citysense provides a heat map of activity within the city, so you can flock to or avoid the most happening parts of town.

But it's not just tourists and the nightclub crowd who can benefit from location-based services. The potential for these applications in everyday life is just as promising. For example, every parent of small children can immediately appreciate the value of having access to something like MizPee, a service that helps you find the closest, cleanest toilets in your area.

Implications for Advertisers and Marketers

The more I used these applications to explore San Francisco, the more I appreciated the enrichment they were providing to my experience. They helped me make better choices about how to spend my limited time and get from place to place more quickly, and they increased my enjoyment of the weekend.

But I began to wonder how much impact these applications would have in my day-to-day life back at home where I'm on familiar territory, and that led me to wonder about how much impact location-based services are going to have on my work. The full impact of these technologies is still a few years off, but here are some trends we're likely to see:

Ubiquitous Data Overlay
Location-based applications will help create a data and social content overlay on top of our physical reality. This overlay will be increasingly accessible to passersby. Today that data overlay includes traffic conditions and restaurant reviews. Maybe tomorrow it will be promotions, consumer complaints or virtual graffiti. Businesses will have to stay alert to this overlay of location-specific data and respond to it in the same way that businesses are learning to respond to opinions in the social media space.

Augmented Reality
With the increasing sophistication of camera phones, it's only going to be easier for marketers, spammers, hackers and artists to plant virtual objects, visual data, art and virtual graffiti. These images, normally invisible, can be overlaid (like a heads-up display) on the real world with a simple camera phone and the right software. If someone "sprays" your storefront with virtual graffiti, what do you do?

Increased Transparency
It's going to be harder and harder to hide anything. If your bathrooms are dirty, if your coffee is stale, if your associates are rude, passersby will know. Both excellence and deficiencies are amplified. Mediocrity that fails to generate any kind of response may cause certain locations to be treated with distrust or disinterest.

Data Visibility
Location in the physical world will still trump most other factors, but visibility in geographic data will be nearly as important. For example, if your location details aren't correct in the databases of location-based services, traffic may suffer. It will be important for business to be well and accurately represented in these location-specific databases.


Here and Now

It will be a while until mobile location-based services are an everyday, mainstream reality, but most of the services being developed already have a Web presence and applications, so there's no excuse for marketers not to be thinking about the implications and opportunities of location-based services today. It can only help to prepare for the day when these services are more widespread.