The advent of internet and new media types turned the traditional advertising that was using newspapers, radio, TV and billboards into an inefficient way of advertising. For small and large businesses targeting is very crucial. The goal is not just to get a foot traffic into the store but to get the right kind of traffic. To find the effective way of advertising, location-based advertising has emerged.
Location-based advertising (LBA) helps local brick and mortar shops by combining mobile advertising with geo-targeting technology. The success of this new brand of advertising reflects into the rate at which the LBA industry is growing. But, LBA faces many challenges such as privacy concerns and competition from online advertising and promotional services.
The Blockchain Technology is all set to disrupt Location-Based Advertising (LBA). New LBA platforms based on this technology offer local businesses a way to nurture online communities to target the local customers and turn them into the loyal customers. This technology helps LBA by building and nurturing a mutually beneficial relationship between the businesses and the customers by tokenizing their services. The businesses can reward their customers by offering tokens (coins) for completing tasks that inherently create value, like posting on social media, writing a brief review and so forth. These LBA platform tokens can be spent at these retailers like cash.
The consumers who work hard to contribute, participate and spend their tokens frequently are tracked by the immutable ledger of blockchain and given a score which allows them to borrow more tokens to use in their favorite stores. Due to this token reward policy, the merchants don’t have to breakeven to win loyal business and can get tangible advertising results in exchange for a small discount.
Most significantly, Blockchain can offer merchants access to irrefutable data that can optimize their efforts. Because of the way the technology is built - with transactions being recorded in an immutable and open ledge, the user data remains protected. It also offers businesses the ability to fully trust their results as there is neither a middleman nor any outside services. This gives merchants the ability to better fine tune their promotions, and offer more relevant deals to customers based on transparent data. Tokenizing services helps to drive transparency in location-based advertising, providing better reach for local businesses and offering customers a better deal in exchange.
In a nutshell, Blockchain technology is helping the local customers to quickly find the local businesses most enthusiastically and also participate in their marketing and promotional activities.
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You say "providing better reach for local businesses and offering customers a better deal in exchange". But how?
It seems like the only answer in your post is that users of the tokenized advertising will be given discounts as incentive for advertising, which essentially means they are getting "paid" instead of say, the producers/crew of a televised commercial, or the owner of a billboard.
How will I, a non-advertiser, benefit from LBA besides receiving "relevant" advertisements from businesses in my area (sorry, but that's not a benefit in my opinion). Genuinely curious!
Thanks for reading my article. As I mentioned in my article this technology also keeps the track of the purchasing, marketing and promotional activities of the consumers and identify the loyal customers who do frequent shopping, marketing and promotional activities. The businesses can offer more tokens and other incentives so that they can continue to be the loyal and active. Basically, loyalty and activities of the consumers will keep on bringing them more and more rewards from these businesses.
I think this has tremendous potential for personalized advertisements and reward programs. Reminds me of the Foursquare approach of being "King" of a certain location or business.
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