SPAM – COMING TO A HIGH STREET NEAR YOU
8th July 2010
By Jamie Kenny
Jam
I’ve never liked spam. Not even as a kid. It was flaccid and tasteless and I just couldn’t see the point of it.
Well that hasn’t changed, and as progress would have it, I’m jibing at its electronic namesake now.
Thanks to a filter built like Cerberus, I don’t get too much of it on email or Twitter, but I get slammed with it at home on the landline.
Most of this telespam is pre-recorded messages for kitchens/broadband/gas… or even worse – 20 seconds of silence stacking up on the answer machine. (I’m beginning to feel a little sorry for the answer machine and have taken to putting my own messages on it, just so it hears a real voice once in a while).
Anyway, spam on the phone is just really annoying. And I think it could get a lot more intense for everyone with the growth of geo-location services.
Right now, innovative opt-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla are relatively small, but they’re growing rapidly (Foursquare has grown to 2m users globally in under two years). With Facebook set to launch geo–location services imminently, a lot more consumers are going to be providing and receiving updates about where they, and their fellow humans are.
Brands of course are getting in on the action, with some big names likes Dominos, Debenhams and Starbucks running campaigns on Foursquare to good effect by rewarding loyal early-adopting consumers. McDonalds is also rumored to be one the first brands to trial Facebook’s service.
This emerging area offers big opportunities for brands to stand out on the high street and connect with consumers in what’s been dubbed the ‘last six feet’. It will also provide brand owners with invaluable data about who visits, when and where.
With location-based ad spend predicted to grow to $4.1bn annually within five years, there’s a real danger consumers are going to be spammed by unscrupulous or naive companies who’ll fail to respect consumers privacy in an effort to get their attention.
So here’s the brief: get yourself a smart, sharp and thoroughly streetwise approach and you’ll find yourself making hay, not spam, in a hot new marketing channel.
