Mobile Coupons — The Fine Line Between Killer App & Spam

After years of promise, location-based marketing with mobile coupons looks set to launch. The technology is already here and is now relatively simple, the difficult part is the business case…there’s likely to be both good and bad implementations for “tapping into the estimated $15 billion retail-promotion market”.
The promise: “Nihal Mehta, founder of Ipsh, said mobile coupons are a “killer application. The reason it hasn’t taken off is that brands don’t know how to capitalize on it. It’s just a matter of time.”
The warnings: “Beth Givens, director of Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit consumer-advocacy group in San Diego, said mobile coupons must be something the individual opts into. For marketers, it would be a “terrible mistake to transmit location-targeted advertising to someone who has not consented” to receiving the message…Jay Stanley, public education director, technology, for the American Civil Liberties Union, said cellphone location data is a “honey pot for privacy invasion”.

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