According to a research report from the analyst firm Berg Insight (www.berginsight.com), the total value of the global real-time mobile location-based advertising and marketing (LBA) market will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 54% to € 10.7 billion in 2018.

This will then correspond to 38.6% of all mobile advertising and marketing. Location-based advertising and marketing will thus represent around 7% of digital advertising, or 2 percent of the total global ad spend for all media, according to the research group.
 
The past year has seen a number of significant developments in the real-time mobile LBA space. One example is the concept of beacons based on Bluetooth low energy (BLE).

"The concept of Bluetooth marketing has been reinvigorated following Apple’s introduction of iBeacon in 2013,"says Rickard Andersson, senior analyst, Berg Insight.

While so far remaining sparsely deployed, Berg Insight anticipates that beacon adoption will take off in 2014 as retailers launch innovative marketing schemes and leverage the possibility to analyse how customers roam and dwell in stores and aisles.

"The burgeoning BLE-based beacon ecosystem is now populated by a large number of diverse players including PayPal, Qualcomm and start-ups such as Estimote, Swirl and Shopkick," says Anderson.

He adds that these companies constitute a completely new set of players competing alongside established LBA specialists like Verve, Placecast and xAd, LBS players including Intersec, Telenav and Waze, and operators such as AT&T, SFR and the UK joint venture Weve.