Location Based Mobile Advertising

Written by Alesya Chichinkina, Toozla.com | 02 December 2010

To elaborate further on the topic of Mobile Marketing in Travel Business we would like share with you about a tool known as LBS (location based services). LBS is a service, accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network exploiting the ability to make use of the geographical position of the mobile device. LBS services can be used in a variety of contexts, including usage for travel, and travel marketing.

Mobile messaging plays an essential role in LBS. Messaging has been used in combination with various LBS applications, such as location-based mobile advertising. Nowadays there are several ways to use LBS applications for promotion. Location based advertisement (LBA) uses delivery of mobile coupons, discounts, or just advertising Information to mobile users who are near to advertised restaurants, cafes, movie theatres, or other close point of sell.

The most innovative usage of LBA is combination of LBS and augmented reality (AR). How does it work for marketing? User of AR application goes beyond some point of sell, that gives advertisement through this application. The advertising messages reaches the user when they stand near this particular point of sell. The message can be delivered in different formats. There are two interesting examples of it:

First one is voice ad. It means that the user hearsadvertisement of nearby points of sell, that comes directly into his mobile phone (as a rule such apps are used with earphones). As an example of such app we can mention Toozla. Toozla is GPS based free mobile travel guide. It has different streams of content and it provides LBA. For understanding the process of such a promotion, you can watch the following video, demonstrating the usage of Toozla.

The second one is Layar. The Layar Reality Browser shows what is around you by displaying real time digital information on top of the real world as seen through the camera of your mobile phone. Layar works by using a combination of the mobile phone’s camera, compass and GPS data to identify the user’s location and field of view, retrieve data based on those geographical coordinates, and overlay that data over the camera view. The advertisement appears on the screen the same way. You can also check out Layar’s in this video.

So with time passing we get more and more useful tools for promoting your travel business.

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