Steve Hall from Adrants (a blog I read every day) was quoted in a recent Mashable piece on the future of Ad Agencies and Social Media:
“With the ability to target people only when they are within purchasing distance, brands will be able to come that much closer to targeting nirvana. Offers can be made only to those meeting certain location (and even demographic) requirements, reducing waste and actually saving a brand a lot of money by minimizing its old school spray-and-pray mass marketing techniques. In a nutshell, mobile will, once and for all, make it possible for a marketer to target without waste.” (Emphasis mine)
And Jolie O'Dell, who wrote the article, finishes the section on location-based services with this:
Between the intelligence you can gather about your clients’ customers and your ability to find more highly qualified targets than ever before, location is indeed the holy grail for advertisers.
I know that it was a piece about advertising and the future of the agency, but in a world of "consumers being in control," we're still mostly looking at any new tools through the agency POV. Consumers don't really care about whether or not advertising can do their job without waste unless it has a direct benefit to them.
If the consumer's in control, then shouldn't any discussion about the future of the business talk about the value to the consumer first?