Urban Airship releases LBS option for marketers

"Understanding where consumers live, work and play adds entirely new dimensions of insight to retailers, brands and media companies' marketing efforts," said Scott Kveton, CEO and Co-Founder, Urban Airship. "We are bringing the consumer back into the center with this approach to location based marketing, enabling marketers to use everything they know about their most loyal customers - their app users - to be more relevant."

Here's how it works: a brand uses pre-defined location boundaries from sources like Nielsen DMA and Maponics to create a specific user area. The location can include time zones, legislative districts and city areas to zip-code level targeting. Once a consumer enters their zone, a message is pushed to their mobile device.

In addition to the location targeting, Urban Airship allows brands to utilize the data gathered from their apps to further target and to ensure the relevancy of the message to that consumer.

"Geotargeting and geofencing have held tremendous promise for mobile marketers but have thus far not lived up to that potential," said Greg Sterline, Opus Research Senior Analyst. "Urban Airship's new capabilities enable marketers and brands to bring much greater precision to geofencing and location targeted notifications."

Urban Airship offers this example: for the upcoming holiday season, a retailer could geo-fence their store locations in highly trafficked shopping malls for the Black Friday rush; using the gathered data, they could ensure the relevancy of the message by targeting shoppers' interests in addition to their location.

Tags: geotargeted ads, LBS tools, location based marketing, mobile ads, mobile marketing, push notifications, Urban Airship