The Wall Street Journal writes last month about geotargeting. While not new news, percolating into the business press no doubt took a fair mount of work from the Quova PR team. The article highlights the strengths: regional content targeting (to watch or not to watch the Red Sox depending on where you are), anti fraud and other measures. The money sentence:
Still, geolocation technology won’t pinpoint Web visitors’ locations beyond the city level, which won’t satisfy advertisers seeking to target potential customers by neighborhood or street.
Correct, indeed. Umibot has often-written about Urban Mapping’s geographically-modified keyword research tool (many enhancements coming soon) that can help overcome this technical limitation of IP-based geotargeting. However, simply being able to target at a local leavel, without considering inventory and advertisers, is folly. As Ian White discussed in a recent location-based services conference in Berlin, the debunking of the “local mobile Starbucks advertising” (nb, extremely tired example), whereby a person walks past a Starbucks and a coupon for a latte suddenly appears, is patently false–now and forever in the near future. But more on that soon…
