Business Opportunities Weblog

April 23, 2007 by Rich Whittle | 1 Comment

BusinessWeek:

Teri Miller has four kids—three boys and a girl, ages 5 through 13. She is 34, works as a hairdresser in Sarasota, Fla., and recently vacationed in Las Vegas. Simply by sending a text message to a number she saw on a Las Vegas billboard, Miller gave Adidas and a marketing outfit, MOVO, all the information they needed to hawk basketball shoes to her over the phone.

They knew Miller was in Vegas, since she responded to the billboard offering information about National Basketball Assn. All-Star game events nearby. Her phone number gave away her hometown, indicating an allegiance to the East Coast All-Star team. The payoff came when Adidas sent Miller a text message about the sale of 200 pairs of limited-edition All-Star basketball shoes.

Advertising is about to get very personal. Marketers are taking tools that they already use to track your Internet surfing and are preparing to combine that information with cell-phone customer data that include not just the area where you live but also the street you’re standing on. The aim is to target the exact person who is most likely to buy a product at the precise moment they’re most likely to buy it. It’s the ad industry’s dream come true: a perfect personalized pitch.

The bigger concern for many mobile users may be that advertisers will simply know their phone number. The industry is ostensibly developing guidelines that keep users from being barraged with messages—restricting, say, how often an advertiser may contact the same consumer in a month. But that cat may be out of the bag: Mobile-phone users who received unwanted messages already have filed lawsuits against marketers.

If you’re feeling spammed, of course, the whole appeal of targeting is turned on its head. Now you’re angry—and it’s personal.

Photo by prosto photos.

In Marketing, Technology | 1 Comment