Facebook has been saying that Apple is hurting small businesses. The-brick-and-mortar business marketing experts at Zenreach completely disagree, citing how important consumer privacy is. CEO John Kelly of Zenreach says:
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Is Apple Hurting Businesses?
“The changes that Apple has rolled out will have a big effect on location-based advertising. The consumer's ability to opt out of this type of targeting along with the fact that GPS has certain challenges with granular positioning means that these first-generation solutions, while good, will face new limitations.”
Not only are these changes an important step forward, you can still have effective marketing without compromising user privacy. John Kelly highlights this through the entirely different, and highly effective, model Zenreach uses.
“Our approach at Zenreach is quite different. We rely exclusively on user's consent to our service, and we are therefore untroubled by—and in fact agree with—Apple's position on this matter. Users decide every day to give up their data in exchange for services, and we support the decision to put the power in the hands of users.
We have no interest in tracking users during their daily commutes or walks around the block. In fact, we have no interest in understanding user behavior outside of their commercial interactions. All of us need a private life away from commercial monitoring. As a result, our solution only looks at users when they engage with one of our clients: dining at a restaurant, shopping in a retail location, etc. But away from those locations, we will only wish them a safe trip home.
Our solution avoids the pitfalls of determining location based on users' GPS-determined location. GPS is a great tool for most scenarios but can lack the precision required in high-density areas and multi-floor buildings to ensure that a consumer is in a particular location (and not in the location next door). We leverage the local WiFi router as the sensor for determining whether a shopper is in a store or not.”
Kelly further says, “we applaud Apple's decision, and we hope that merchants and advertisers looking for a location-based solution will consider ours.”
