In case you haven't noticed, the print media business is on its death bed. Or, as James Poniewozik said in his Time Magazine essay last week, "When the economy sneezes, the media business catches pneumonia." The result is that retailers are pulling their advertising because their business is drying up. And when retailers start pulling back, magazines and newspapers go out of business. But, they still need to advertise smartly. They are looking for alternatives and mobile advertising may be a way to drive more traffic into physical retail locations.

But the model and technology for location-based advertising is meeting resistance and it looks like the way mobile ads are served is not consistent with the way they should be delivered. White suggested that using IP addresses is the wrong way to do it. What I think needs to be done is to connect his way of creating location-based advertising zones with old-school, Huff model-based retail trade area delineation and sell these ad trade areas to retailers. Urban Mapping has created neighborhood zones for dense urban areas, a more relevant boundary for retailers that can more closely approximate trade areas. They understand trade areas better than they do IP-based service areas.

In other words, the location-based ad folks need to have a pow wow with retailing gurus. Retailers understand spatial interaction models; they understand attractiveness features like parking spaces (another Urban Mapping data set), SKUs, egress/ingress, etc., all Huff-model attributes in addition to proximity of consumers. These are the means to define retail networks.

Location-based advertising service firms are trying to sell to the search engine companies and not the retailers. It's the retailers that are going to buy the ad space. Retailers need to better understand what local search can do for them and location-based advertising agents need to understand trade areas. They are not the same and the geographic extents on which each are based are entirely different. An IP-based local search zone may not be either specific-enough or may represent an area no where near the local retailer.

Urban Mapping's data solutions can help support the growth of location-based advertising and I suggested that other firms like Nielsen's Claritas and Pitney Bowes MapInfo as well as Tactician and geoVue might want to sit together and hash this out. The solution could be a boon for the future of mobile location-based advertising.