Proximity Marketing – fact or fiction?

Imagine you’re walking along a city street passing a restaurant or bar you frequent at happy hour and you get a text message notifying you of a special dinner or drink offer. Or maybe you are walking through a crowded department store and as you walk by a digital ad screen a segment on shoe department specials (or electronics department specials for me) comes on, perhaps interests you and you proceed on your way and perhaps stop into the department that was on your way anyway. Sound like science fiction? Well, its closer than you think and I believe that proximity marketing will take its form like this and not as it was represented in the movie The Minority Report. Subtle messaging that just happens to come to be delivered at the right time and place will begin to come as opt-in sms messages or emails and grow from there.

The technology to deliver this type of right place messaging is still in its infancy, but as providers like Skyhook Wireless (the company behind the iPhone’s positioning ability), Loki, and Loopt prove; the ability to integrate location into everything from search to Facebook to Micro-Blogging already exists. The jump to fully aware location based messaging cannot be far away.

With the integration of proximity into the marketing toolset, we need to add Right Place alongside Right Target, Right Time & Right Offer as components of a successful direct response marketing campaign. With this in mind, what are you doing to plan for these changes? Did you even realize these changes were coming? Are you even prepared for such real-time marketing? We hope you are, because some of your competitors will be…

Drop us a line and share your thoughts on the changing landscape and how it may affect you – what other changes excite (or concern) you?