‘With The Physical Web, You Become The Search Engine’ – Marketing Land
Barry Levine says, “What if everything could send out its own web link?
That, essentially, is the idea behind the Physical Web, a new open source approach to beacons that Google announced last summer. And it’s an approach that could — if it becomes popular — significantly change the way marketers do their jobs.
A beacon is a small device that acts as a kind of digital lighthouse, emitting a location ID from its spot in the ceiling or on the wall of a store that says, in effect, “This is location 123.”
That location signal is picked up by a store app on the smartphone of a nearby customer, standing in the store. The location signal is sent via the store’s WiFi or the customer’s 3G/4G data service to a marketer’s server.
The location ID tells the server that the customer is standing in the games aisle at Walmart’s, for instance, and the marketer’s system responds by sending something like a discount coupon for a game to the app on the customer’s smartphone. Some marketers use it simply to track the number of people who have visited that aisle”.
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