This month Apple ruled that it would not permit the use of user location-based advertising on the iPhone/iPad/iPod through Apps bought from The App Store.
Developers had been trying to use the gagdets' GPS location technology to promote products, places and services in proximity of a user. So an iphone user could be near a cinema, and get a tweet, email or text telling them of offers or upcoming movies. Or a restaurant could send out news of available tables to all potential diners in proximity.
Does Apple want to protect us all from the annoyance of a new form of SPAM? Or are they just after a slice of the pie. Allowing developers to take on this technology free of charge would mean handing over invaluable information about it's customers for free, hanging onto it could mean another massive way of profiting from the hugely successful site by selling it on to App developers and advertisers. App Store users are worried that Apple lording it over software developers in this way could mean free apps become a thing of the past or mean developers favour other platforms like Android.
But the significant interest here for us is what this will mean for marketing. The popularity of iPhones and other smartphones continues to grow day by day, across the world, as does our desire to fill them up with location-based Apps. When deals do eventually get done on this, it'll only be a matter of time before ads targeted like never before start to become common place.
There'll still be a need for the "blanket-bomb" approaches of traditional campaigns, filling newspapers and billboards, but ultra-targeted "sniper" advertising becomes commonplace.
Our Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and online shopping histories already provide an extensive profile of our interests, our economic status and our general likes and dislikes. This information would have been very hard to glean from most savvy consumers just a few years ago, and would have required sneaky tricks (competitions, surveys and customer incentives) to get most people to offer it up. Nowadays we upload a detailed, colourful and complete picture of our entire personality, adding to it day by day. We follow our favourite brands, become fans of celebs we like and tell shout about our aspirations and politics.
And so creative agencies are rethinking they way the communicate brands to consumers. Advertising will need to be designed to adapt and incorporate the personal information of specific individuals. It will then need to physically lead a prospective customer direct to a product.
A new form of advertising could be just around the corner.