I must say I didn't expect this much great news being announced so early in 2009. Looks like a good year for mobile marketing, and proximity marketing (a.k.a. out-of-home advertising). It must be when, in the same week you get news about two separate bluetooth hotspot networks in two completely different parts of the world. The first, I already wrote about in my last post.

The second (and latest I heard about) was formed by a joint move from Intera and Macerich, for a bluetooth proximity marketing network that covers five Macerich regional shopping centres in the greater Los Angeles area. From the Yahoo News article:

This launch includes Westside Pavilion in West Los Angeles, The Oaks in
Thousand Oaks, Los Cerritos Center in Cerritos, Lakewood Center in
Lakewood, and Stonewood Center in Downey. Bluetooth zones are located in
or near food courts, cinema box offices, lobbies and other strategic
locations throughout the more than six million square feet of retail
space.

This is certainly an important project, and the first I hear about in the U.S. This comes to add to the already existing list of bluetooth hotspot networks :

• in Canada, (where hotspots are available at a number of newstand locations)
  
• and in India (where bluetooth hotspots are being used to augment a media sharing website).

(If you are aware of any other such networks of bluetooth hotspots, please do let me know, so I can tell others about them too.)

This bluetooth marketing network differs from the other two, in that it is the first targeted specifically to shopping centres. As such, it allows for tailoring a whole range of solutions and commercial applications to the target audience, which is a lot easier to define, considering the deployment locations.

If more networks keep popping up at this rate, pretty soon the opportunities for proximity marketing around the world will be endless. This makes it all the more important to focus on more interactive and more intelligent mobile marketing campaigns, in order to better attract customers' attention, and increase your conversion. If you are thinking about running such a campaign in the near future, my advice to you is: make it interactive. Interactivity really is the key element that makes mobile stand out from other marketing mediums, and a very good reason why conversion rates are so high on mobile marketing campaigns.