With mobile, location is king. That is, when it’s the right location.
Leveraging where a phone is located at any given moment allows fulfilment of the long-desired marketing dream of providing highly relevant messaging to consumers.
At the beginning of last year, Thinknear by Telenav started measuring just how accurate that location data used to send those phones was.
The first I heard of this was during presentation at the MediaPost Mobile Insider Summit in January 2014.
In a presentation at that conference, Thinknear execs said they found that ads were more effective when delivered to a mobile phone closer to a location, as I wrote about here at the time (Missing the Target with Targeted Ads).
For example, a person near a quick serve restaurant is more likely to click on a mobile ad relating to it than a person far away, which makes perfect sense.
But the bigger news in that presentation was that much of the advertising being sent to phones was not based on accurate location.
At that time, Thinknear found the following accuracy rates in ad messages sent to phones:
This meant that many messages were missing the mark, sometimes by a lot.