Verve Mobile is a growing firm that has been providing high quality location-based advertising to clients for a number of years. They have recently announced the acquisition of Fosbury, which is a company that provides beacon campaign management services. The companies have not yet disclosed the purchase price or any of the other specifics of the deal at this time.
While this is not a major acquisition, it is an indication that more and more focus in the location advertising industry is going toward beacon services. Verve currently provides clients with hundreds of millions of ad impressions on mobile devices each day. These ads are typically offering people the option to tap for a special deal from a company in the geographic area.
With the power of the Fosbury services, they will be able to provide more specific data for mobile targeting, which will help to provide advertisers with more detailed information. This, of course, will help to provide higher quality and more targeted ads. In addition, Verve will now have access to a tech platform allowing them to add mobile wallet payment functionality to their ads. Since the announcement of Apple Pay, the mobile wallet concepts have really started to become popular so this was likely an important factor for Verve when making this acquisition.
When commenting on the new mobile wallet feature they now have access to, Verve Mobile’s president and founder Tom Kenney said, “We would like to add that to every one of our creative units. This enables us to do that.”
In a longer term benefit, the beacon technology will likely be very useful. A growing number of retailers are beginning to use this type of system to be able to immediately reach out to customers who are physically in their store, or nearby. When done properly, this type of advertising can be extremely effective.
This tech is used to cross the boundaries between strictly digital marketing and marketing for the physical retail world. Providing digital marketers with additional abilities to tap into the massive brick and mortar ad budgets will offer innovative marketers a lot of opportunity. While this specific acquisition is just one small move, it is still exciting to see the digital and performance marketing industries move in this direction.
