Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck: Location Is The Real-World Cookie
From improved attribution to real-world gaming, the hot topic at last week's LocationWorld was the 'future of location.' Is that future already here?
Even a decade ago, telling marketers that they would be able to determine without a doubt which consumers walked into a store as a result of a specific ad would have seemed impossible. And yet, here we are: In the way that mobile has redefined every aspect of marketing — and life in general — the “future of location” is arriving now.
At last week’s LocationWorld conference, we caught up with Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck to discuss how location has revolutionized everything from marketing to gaming — and why the future is about so much more than VR.
GeoMarketing: Where are we in the location ecosystem today — and what is Foursquare prioritizing as we look ahead to 2017?
Jeff Glueck: Location is really the atomic unit of mobile. We know we live in this mobile-first world, but marketers and analysts and developers are just beginning to scratch the surface of how location can bring intelligence to everything.
In the next year, we see a bunch of things happening: For marketers that are brick-and-mortar businesses, where [over] 90 percent of consumer spending still happens in stores, they have the opportunity — finally — to know whether their advertising is working; to understand which ads among different types of creative are actually driving people into [possibly] thousands of locations.
The attribution portion of a marketing spend is something that Foursquare is now offering to marketers, and they love it — because there is no cookie in the real world.
Location is the real-world cookie.
Exactly. For marketers, understanding what’s working and who you want to talk to — based not on some sort of social affinity, but on real world patterns — that’s powerful. In today’s panel, in [talking about] the future of location, we discussed how just because someone pins a Ferrari on Pinterest or follows Ferrari on Instagram, that doesn’t mean they are actually shopping for a Ferrari.
At Foursquare, we now have profiles of over 120 million U. S. consumers based on where they really go. This allows marketers to [go beyond] looking at searches for Ferraris, or who’s following Ferrari on social media. And if you are going to a number of car dealerships, you are probably in the market for [a car.]
That kind of thing is much more real. So, that’s [something] we’re going to see a lot more of from marketers, I think.
What about for Foursquare itself?
Well, I think the second area where location is really changing things is for analysts. For our part, we watch this whole trend towards understanding the world, and trends through social data. That was obviously powerful, and now we’re actually turning the real-world foot traffic patterns into a way to understand trends in the world.
This goes beyond retail. We have, for instance, hedge funds that subscribe to our place insights feed to understand an aggregate — which chains are hot, which places are hot. That’s helping them make financial decisions. We were able to predict that Chipotle sales, due to the e-coli scare, would be down 30 percent in Q1 two weeks before they actually announced that their earnings were down 29.7 percent. Leveraging social mobile data in that way to understand what is going on in the real world and predictably make decisions is powerful.
Third, things are really changing for networks of developers. Pokémon Go opened up a fresh interest in what is possible in augmented reality and real world gaming.
How is it changing the game for developers? And what’s next for gaming, then, in the wake of Pokémon Go?
Foursquare has 100,000 developers who use our platform, and we are just getting started. Currently, we power pick-up and drop-off in Uber. We power tagging tweets for Twitter. We power pinning a photo in Pinterest to any location globally. This next generation of developers that we are working with is trying to understand users and improve consumer services, games, and augmented reality based real-world patterns. We’re enabling technology for developers to do this. For example: To understand that you’ve never been in Las Ramblas before in Barcelona, and you’re right around the corner from a tapas place that three of your friends love. To understand that you’ve been to this other restaurant 20 times before, and so we don’t need to tell you anything about it.
That is just the start, but you can imagine games that go beyond what Pokémon Go did and actually let you play in real life? There are a thousand other ways that location can influence characters: The avatar could even get extra strength whenever the player is standing inside a Starbucks, for example.
So you see a lot of possibilities for natural, organic partnerships between brick-and-mortar businesses and these sorts of games that naturally tie in real-world location.
Exactly. Marketers, analysts, and developers just see location in it’s infancy. It’s starting to transform how people do business. I think we’re just getting started.
