What Pokemon Go Really Means for Marketers. It's not what you're thinking.

You can’t get away from it - Pokemon Go is the hottest topic in tech these days. Countless articles have outlined how marketers can take advantage of this new hyper-engaged audience and embed their own content or location in the game to drive traffic and brand recognition. Leveraging the existing audience of millions of addicted Pokemon-gamers is certainly an exciting opportunity, but what is arguably more important is what this games massive success means for app publishers and location-based content in general.

Since the earliest iterations of Foursquare, there has been a powerful connection between how engaging the blending of the physical and digital worlds can be. As consumed as we are by our technology, we continue to live in a very stimulating and interactive physical world - a world where a good deal of our daily experiences and interactions occur. True success comes when these worlds can be seamlessly blended, connecting our mobile phones with the physical world around us, often gamifying our real world interactions.

While pioneers like Foursquare made huge investments in R and D and engineering resources around getting location right, today, location-based content and experiences are more accessible than ever. Precision accurate tech like beacons and highly scalable, location tech such as geofences give marketers a very accessible foundation upon which the digital and physical worlds can be bridged.

While there certainly is no ‘one size fits all’ use case for bringing together the digital and the physical, what brands now have at their fingertips are a number of location-centric platforms that empower app publishers with cost effective tools to test and iterate through their own location-based use cases. Finding your Pokemon Go-type engagement is more accessible than ever.

At Rover, we’ve had the opportunity to work with a number of brands as they navigated through this process to uncover what bridging the physical and digital meant for their app. The results have been exciting to say the least. As more brands begin to explore the location opportunity, surprise success stories like Pokemon Go will become more common occurrences.

What’s your Pokemon Go inspired use case?