Google awarded “Location-based mobile advertising” Patent !! What’s the patent, exactly?
What Google now has with the awarding of this patent includes:
- Using location as a factor to decide whether an ad should be served or not (targeting and relevancy)
- Tracking the performance of an ad using location (metrics and analytics)
- Using location to determine what kind of content should be included in an ad (custom landing pages, banners, etc)
- Allowing advertisers to enter their own location data for better ad targeting (advertising platforms)
So if even part of the reason an ad publisher serves a particular ad to a consumer is because of that users location, they now infringe Google’s patent. Part of the patent covers just LOOKING at location information - even if you don’t use that information, Google has patented “accepting geo-location information associated with the requested”.
What does this mean?
It means that Google has a broad hold on the world of location-based advertising. The real question is what is Google going to do with that? If you read through the patent description, Goog
le spends quite some time talking about the efficacy of services like Adwords and how they can be effected by this. It very much gives the impression that this entire system has been developed in order to allow search-related advertising banners to serve better targeted results.
The problem is that the actual patent covers a much larger range of mobile advertising channels. Mobile marketing is a very diverse area, with a large number of possible methods for serving ads. But this patent could potentially move in on any of them - if they want to use location as a targeting factor. It may be targeted at banner ads that accompany search results, but it could be used by Google to control targeted SMS ads, or idle-screen advertising. It doesn’t matter what the channel is that you use in mobile, Google now has a hold on any location targeting you might want to use.
Courtesy: www.gomonews.com