Placecast, one of the leaders in location-based mobile marketing, recently announced a deal with a European mobile carrier to deliver location-based deals and offers to mobile subscribers. Check out the article here on TechCrunch. My take on this is that this is a good move to aggregate mobile consumers who have all pre-enrolled, or opted-in, to receive SMS messages from the wireless carrier. Or at least it’s easy to communicate with mobile customers en mass to entice them to opt-in. Having a ready-made audience with whom Placecast can market makes for a much more compelling program for advertisers, versus the often time-consuming efforts to enroll a specific merchant’s customers into the mobile messaging program. That’s a tough road, especially since more merchants are still trying to amass email databases and are at square-one for adding mobile numbers to their CRM program.
