Google has just launched a new program called Google Latitude which is an extension of their popular mobile Google Maps application. Essentially the new system extends Mobile Google Maps to provide real time location information for friends that you have chosen to follow and in turn have allowed you to follow them. Images of friends you are following appear on the map so you can see where they are at any given moment. You can also quickly interact with anyone you are monitoring through GTalk, SMS or Gmail.

There is no doubt that it could be a bit stalker’ish but since it is 100% opt-in it is not so bad in my opinion (at least one privacy group feels otherwise). To increase privacy options Google was smart enough to include the ability to broadly change privacy settings to either stop everyone’s viewing of your location entirely or just provide the city you are in. You can even manually select the location you are at instead of having it show automatically – a great option if you need to be appear to be somewhere else or you simply don’t have enough connectivity to show your location automatically.

But we are talking about marketing here. Let’s take a moment to consider just what a company with the reach of Google could do with the data it is undoubtedly collecting right now from the travel habits revealed by Latitude users. It sure can get our creative juices working since it could take mobile advertising to the next level…

As soon as Google wanted to it could adapt a pay-per-click service for Google Maps where merchants with Google local profiles could pay to get a Latitude user’s attention. Then whenever you happened to be nearby a paying merchant you would see their business appear with a certain icon… say a “$” which means the store is having a sale. This could get out of hand if a ton of merchants happened to advertise in the same area but that can easily be dealt with by:

* Limiting the businesses that show up based on the map’s zoom level – to keep down the clutter.
* Rotating the ads to give advertisers play time based on their ad budget just as Google does with Adwords.
* Enforce day-parting based on the store hours of each advertising business. This would be a great way to ensure that night-establishments such as nightclubs and restaurants get their fair shake at some map space during the twilight hours when 9-5 businesses are lights-out.

What do you think, my friends?

Best

Manuel A. Alonso Coto

Ps. By the way, we’ll be dicussing this and other hot issues about Digital Marketing & Advertising in our third yearly forum next week. Hope to meet you there!