I've just read about this competition and I agree it seems like a great way to bring things in the Location-Based Services sector forward a bit. It takes this type of motivation for people to actively participate into forming tomorrow's scene in lbs.

I believe in such competitions because they bring out some great ideas that can really help push the world forward. These type of competitions (especially the ones were no implementation is needed, like this one) are much like long brainstorming sessions, but with a prize!

The location-based services competition contains four categories:

Regarding proximity marketing in particular (which is the category most related to this blog -- not that the others aren't of course), the announcement explains what they are looking for:

So the concept we are talking about goes like this. Through a form of marketing, you convince people to opt in to a service, it could be via a brochure, a message on product packaging or on a label, or perhaps through a website or billboard. You will allow the service to send you messages based on your interests in products or services, which will probably be SMS or Text Messages. The messages might contain an offer, an electronic coupon, or ask you to do something.

To me the concept of being offered special deals for things that I am specifically interested in at a time that I would like to receive it is a great idea. For the marketing company if they can find willing subjects it is also great because it is targetted rather than the normal scattergun approaches. How much junk mail have you received in the recent build up to Christmas sales mostly about things you weren’t interested in? What would be the ad drop to sales conversion ratio. A very good DM (Direct Marketing) Campaign would get 5-10% return, the average would probably be less than 4%. If you know you can target people that are interested, you would get a significantly greater result.

The thing is, you don’t want SPAM solicited or not, so there need to be rules and if the rules aren’t followed, the entire industry could be set back for many years. So for the competition our rules are:

1. You must clearly understand what you are opting into.How many messages are you likely to receive.

2. You need to have control over when you will receive messages. For example for a ‘Happy Hour Club’ You might decide you only want to receive messages on Friday and Saturday nights and only between 6 and 10 PM.

3. From a proximity perspective you may only want to receive offers when you are within a km of a participating bar or club.

4. It needs to be easy and clear how to opt out. People might try something once in a while, but there are many services such as subscription newsletters where it is very difficult to figure out how to opt out of the service.

It’s interesting when you start searching for existing applications, how few actually exist so far, while the web is full of sites suggesting what could be done, most of the companies who could be doing it aren’t and wouldn’t know where to start, which is why this competition is so important.

I won't be entering the competition myself, so if any of you are interested in this you can drop me a quick mail and I'll be glad to share my views on your idea with you (and you alone). I might also write an article about it if it's really interesting (and I have your permission - of course).

Good luck to everyone entering!