Foursquare Releases Pinpoint Platform For Location-Based Marketing

Foursquare has released its new advertising product called Pinpoint to provide brands with the ability to utilize the company’s location expertise to target users based on where they go in the real world.

The company explains that Pinpoint leverages Foursquare’s massive quantity of data to offer cross-platform, location-based ad targeting technology. With Pinpoint, advertisers can use Foursquare data to target ads on desktop, mobile and tablet. The platform is not limited to Foursquare’s apps, and the company explains its plans to sell ads across a “verified ecosystem of apps, exchanges and publishers.” The product’s launch partners include Google, Turn and Drawbridge, as well as top brands including AT&T, Coors Light, FedEx, Jaguar Land Rover, Samsung Galaxy and Choice Hotels.

As the company points out on its landing page for Pinpoint, Foursquare has a huge amount of data collected from six years of user activity that includes 7 billion check-ins, 90 million tastes added, 70 million tips, 65 million places, 85,000 developers and 55 million people.

“I think this has massive potential,” said Steven Rosenblatt, Foursquare’s chief revenue officer, to Adweek. “One thing we’ve always been asked is, ‘How do we take what you have built and apply it for hundreds of millions of people?’ That’s a massive opportunity. If you think about where mobile advertising is going, the Holy Grail is driven by location. The problem is, while there’s been a lot of noise around location, there’s a lot of bad location data out there.”

Car dealerships and location-based advertising go hand-in-hand, so Pinpoint is certain to be an interesting product for marketers in the auto industry to explore.

Mindshare North America will be using Pinpoint for one of their clients, Jaguar Land Rover. Jeff Malmad, the mobile lead of the company, told Adweek the technology will allow the brand to effectively reach consumers who have visited other auto dealerships.

“The geo-patterns will allow us to reach our core consumer at scale,” said Malmad. “From a big-ticket, automotive perspective, it’s really imperative to target people based on where they have been. The places people go are the best indicator of who they are.”

Pinpoint seems to be a wise monetization strategy for Foursquare. The company has been criticized for losing momentum in recent years, especially since it moved its check-in functionality into the Swarm app. There is really no question Foursquare’s biggest asset is the massive amount of location data it has built over the years, and Pinpoint should allow the company to generate revenue from this powerful resource.