Personalization means you request what you want and your needs are recorded and stored in a large database that uses your ‘personalized’ information to match you to other services you may need.  The next time you need something, you’re magically presented with a set of options that uncannily come pretty close to services you were actually looking for.

Everyone at some point in their life has looked at some form of map.  Whether a London tube map, New York subway, French metro, A to Z street finder or world atlas, a high proportion of the population has sneaked a peek at a map to plan their route from point A to point B.

October 2004 – Where2 and Keyhole Inc, August 2006 – Neven Vision, December 2006 – Endoxen, June 2007 – Panaramio and July 2007 – Image America.  These are the dates that Google purchased each of these respective companies in an attempt to develop Google Maps and add additional features and functionality.  Whenever I’m traveling outside of Israel, I always use Google maps to navigate from my hotel to the nearest restaurant, conference venue or shopping center.  Traveling without a mobile GPS system, the information derived from Google Maps has become invaluable.  As a consumer, it’s a service that once used, is difficult to live without.  Additionally, Google maps provides functionality for local businesses in specific territories to add their business details for inclusion in area maps.  Using Google Adwords, ads can also be placed as balloons within Google maps.

In contrast, Yahoo purchased just one company, Whereonearth, back in October 2005.  Specializing in web mapping, Yahoo has now used the Whereonearth technology as the foundation for Yahoo Maps.  Similar to Google, ads can be displayed within the map and viewed using business navigation buttons that, when clicked on, will show where the business resides on the map being viewed.

However, in both of these instances, advertising businesses when a person is static in front of a computer, is probably not the most ideal of presenting ‘reactive’ advertising.  Firstly, the person’s primary goal is to get from place A to place B.  Seeing an advert for a business that detracts from the aim of the search, while situated in a static location, would not influence a person as much as being told about the place the moment you are traveling nearby or even more so if the place had been reached and the business was in the immediate vicinity then and there.

Psychological studies carried out on unfinished tasks, looked at how waiters were able to remember long complicated orders, but once the food had been delivered to the customer, the waiter completely forgot the order.  This is commonly referred to as the Zeigarnik effect.  Bluma Zeigarnik discovered that anything that had no conclusion, such as an unfinished task could be remembered much easier than a finished task.

Using this information, the most effective form of marketing within maps and the personalization knowledge of a person’s profile, would be to serve ads for businesses that are already known to be of interest to the user at a time when the user is performing a pre determined journey, before completion of the trip.  The ad served in this way has the potential to have a higher take up ratio than any other mobile campaign.

Jaiku, Zingku, GrandCentral, bruNET GmbH, Android, Reqwireless and Dodgeball are all the mobile based companies that Google has acquired over the last three years.

Turning mobile devices into mobile navigational advertising devices is the future.  It’s yet another way to utilize the potential of mobile marketing.  The thought moves away from the standard text messages or the occasional coupon campaign and supplies users with relevant utilities and relevant services to fit the user’s needs.