Global Location Based Advertising Market to Reach $12.8 Billion by 2017

A comprehensive global report on Location Based Advertising (LBA) markets released by Global Industry Analysts, Inc., a publisher of off-the-shelf market research shows that the global market for Location Based Advertising is projected to reach $12.8 billion by the year 2017. With mobile Internet gaining in popularity and the proportion of smartphone sales increasing, LBA market holds enormous potential. The market is driven by favorable factors including spurt in number of GPS and Wi-Fi enabled phones, increased merchandising and shopping activity among consumers, growing popularity of mobile commerce, and increasing usage of Location based Social Network Services.

Location based advertising (LBA) involves delivering strategic advertisement to users based on their location. LBA is expected to stimulate growth in the wider mobile advertising market as it presents immense opportunities for higher return on investment as compared to other traditional advertising avenues. Despite being a relatively new phenomenon, LBA has created significant interest among various stakeholders, with mobile handset manufacturers, service providers, marketers, and application developers making aggressive moves to get a foothold in the market. Companies and brands are enthusiastic about this new advertising avenue, which provides them with the option to advertise personalized content to a wide and mobile customer base. The ability to instantaneously connect users to places, resources and people in their immediate vicinity promises to offer user unrivalled experiences. Similarly, for advertisers, location-enriched data promises to emerge into a powerful resource tool for value addition. Location based advertising enables behavioral targeting, leading to unrivalled levels of ad customization that heightens the relevancy of the same to the customer, and also the chances of consummating a sale transaction. Consumers are now becoming increasingly receptive regarding the sharing of locations with services and applications in exchange for local, well-timed and appropriate promotions and deals, reflecting a shift towards location relevant ads being provided by location-based applications.

The United States and Europe dominate the global LBA market, as stated by the new market research report on Location Based Advertising. Both technological as well as economic advancements are responsible for driving mobile advertising and marketing sector in the US. Trends in the technological arena include increase in the number of smart phones, enhanced user interfaces, increased speed and enlarged storage, while the economical advancement includes packaged data plans. Although currently a fledging market compared to the US, LBS in Europe flaunts robust growth potential with the last couple of years witnessing the launch of a wide range of LBS services across the continent.

Though the concept of contextually related and location based advertisements is novel, there is a rise in awareness regarding mobile based advertisements, specifically owing to the introduction of 3G smartphones with larger screens that has enabled the growth of mobile media. Roll out of 3G technologies, which delivers rich data forms at faster rates is providing further impetus to the LBA market. Spurred by this development, LBA market is expected to take rapid strides in developing countries. In addition, the LBA market is also being fostered by the increasing penetration of GPS enabled handsets that enable LBA by providing information about the users exact geographic location. Integration with online social platforms is expected to drive LBA due to real time dispersion of information amongst the customer’s friend circle. Further check-in features are also leveraged upon by brands for geo-social applications to deliver promotions and coupons when customers enter their store or when customers are located within a defined area around the store.

Being a new and evolving concept, the LBA market faces certain teething problems, which need to be resolved in order for the market to realize its full potential. Marketers are yet to grasp an understanding of how to maximize potential from personalization that LBA services can provide. In addition, separate costs associated with designing and advertising, absence of consistent and reliable methods for measurement of metrics and privacy invasion also hamper higher adoption of LBA.

Select major players profiled in the report include Apple Inc., Google Inc., mOcean Mobile, Loopt Inc., NAVTEQ, Placecast Inc., TeleNav Inc., among others.

The research report titled “Location Based Advertising (LBA): A Global Strategic Business Report” announced by Global Industry Analysts Inc., provides a strategic review of the key market trends, recent strategic corporate initiatives, and profiles of key market participants. The report provides annual sales estimates and projections for Location Based Advertising market for the years 2008 through 2017, by the following geographic markets – US, Canada, Japan, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of World.