Last week we were asked to help troubleshoot technical issues that a company (who shall remain nameless) was having with a mobile marketing campaign.
Without giving too much away, the plan is to use a location-based system to call people on their cell phones and direct them to a special marketing event in their area. I’m not doing it justice (because we didn’t do it), but it is actually pretty cool. Anyway, the problem was that it wasn’t working. According to the system identifying the cell phones, people should be at Point A, but were really at Point B, and everything just sort of fell off from there.
Fortunately, it only took a few quick questions to diagnose the problem – no, they aren’t using GPS; yes; they had good signal strength; no, it didn’t matter which carrier; no, it worked just fine on their campus – just not downtown; and no, it wasn’t everyone – just some people.
Mystery solved! A few adjustments to the algorithm that was being used to identify the target audience and everything was back up and running. I’m told that the marketing test was fairly successful and the program will be rolled out to more locations in the near future. So don’t be too alarmed if you get a call in the near future from someone that seems to know exactly where you are invites you to come to a cool location quite near where you are.