Few articles raising doubts about location-based advertising: Unni, R., Harmon, R. (2007) Perceived Effectiveness of Push vs. Pull Mobile Location-Based Advertising. In: Journal of Interactive Advertising, Vol. 7, Nr. 2:
"Pull LBA fared better than push LBA. However, value perceptions of LBA and intentions to try this service appear to be quite low. Also, privacy concerns relating to location data were high, and perceived benefits were low. (...) Interestingly, initial surveys by market research agencies such as Driscoll and In-Stat showed a high level of interest and willingness to pay for location-based services such as navigation (driving directions), maps and guides, and traffic updates. Unlike LBA, these services are perceived to be more utilitarian and hence benefits and perceived value are easier to communicate. Results of our study show that the perceived benefits from LBA are low."
Banerjee, S. & Dholakia R.R. (2008) Mobile advertising: does location-based advertising work?, MMA International Journal of Mobile Marketing,
""location inertia" seems to characterize consumer responses from a private location. We use the term location inertia because this relative unwillingness to shop when advertised in private places has nothing to do with geographical distance from the store. In the LBS scenarios, private or public locations, the distances of the advertised store were specified as exactly the same (less than 0.1 mile away) but it appears that the actual distance does not matter; despite knowing that the store is the same distance away, a consumer is less likely to avail the offer when the ad is received at a private location than a public location. (...) The example of mobile advertising discussed in this paper can be simply viewed as an Internet pop-up ad that has traced the consumer's location and accordingly appeared on his mobile phone."
Why do I blog this? I'm not necessarily into this kind of application but I'm often asked by clients and journalists about the co-called "effectiveness" of using location-based ads in a "push" mode. My general understanding of these technology is that users find it intrusive and not very useful but it's good to have more data up my sleeve to discuss the complexity of people's perspective on this.
The main problem I see in the research papers about this is that they generally focus on projective methods (as opposed to following people using location-based advertising platforms).