There is a great deal of buzz and hype around the emerging market of Geo-advertising – that advertising wonderland which will allows brands the ability to ping you with timely offers as they match your real world location with real world businesses that are offering deals or promoting brands and items.

Also known as contextual advertising this ad agency nirvana is about offering in real-time adverts that provide relevance to your current location – it does this via a mobile device which for most people is primarily their mobile phone. It works by broadcasting your location and from this advertisers can offer you things.

Things like – a free muffin with any coffee purchase as you walk past the local Starbucks, 20% of Nike Shoes as you head into the Rebel Sports store, buy one get one free on books at Borders as you wander on past. You get the idea.

Of course, for a lot of us the idea of this is appalling – we are assaulted by advertising 24/7 from street billboards to Facebook ads – the last thing we need is for this advertising to be pinging us incessantly as we move from location to location. It also quickly triggers issues around privacy – allowing some faceless corporate entity to monitor your every move as you travel through the world would make most of us sick. To that I would ask: What if it was targeted? What if it was user managed?

In effect you create a profile and just like dating you choose what types of brand entities can be matched to you

We all love a good deal? If you could control what, how and when such pinged adverts were sent and who had access to your location then it could be argued that this would be of some use. Relevant advertising has proven to be something that people / consumers are comfortable with. Emailed coupons / offers, Store Card promotions and SMS Alerts are all existing focused advertising that work and where people are happy to be included. These work because a) They are Opt-In and easy to Opt-Out of, and b) The Consumer has chosen to be included because the content of the advertising or brand is of value to them and they want to be informed – be it deals, new products or competitions.

Now imagine you could have this relevant value advertising space – let’s call it the Brand-Zone – with you 24/7 as you moved through the world. You setup you Brand-Zone settings with your preferred brands or businesses; the times you allow it to operate and the areas you allow it to detect or track you – in effect you create a profile and just like dating you choose what types of brand entities can be matched to you. Once you have done this you go about your life, only now when you walk past the local Borders it lets you know they are offering 40% of a full-price book; or KFC pings you with a discount voucher as you drive past in your car. Importantly businesses that you don’t want offers from are silent because they don’t match you profile. Welcome to the world where advertising is controlled by you and it is relevant to you.

This world is not far away – in fact I suspect that the rumors about Apple’s iAd product may involve some of these aspects. There are some things that need to be put in place however before this type of advertising model can fully develop. 1. Smart-phones need to become the primary type of mobile that people carry instead of the standard feature phone or basic call-only mobiles. 2. Phone OS’s need to allow background services – Android does this already – but Apple needs to embrace it for their iPhone OS (it should be noted that current rumors are that this will be addressed in the next update in iPhone OS 4.0), as well as Blackberry and Nokia.

And of course; 3. We need to have a Geo-advertising framework to be setup – who will be the first to do this will be of interest. It could come from a few fields but I think for traction will have to be Apple or Google. Google is the natural fit for this and given that their business model still runs on advertising you would think that they would be quite motivated to get this in play; but for all their great Android work they seem to be slow to start in the mobile advertising space.

The Brand-Zone is nearly upon us – for some this could be a very unwelcome addition to our already noisy, loud and dense consumer advertising world – for most of us I think it will be a boon – if only because it is yet another disruptive stake driven into the heart of the old world rules of top down thinking. The Mad Men agencies of Madison Avenue can no longer just put it out there and hope to touch as many eye-balls as possible via a mass broadcast because broadcast-type advertising is on the wane (just Google for stats on Radio, Television and Newspaper usage).

Targeted advertising is the future – so the possibility of having this Brand-Zone is appealing – a special zone that radiates from me as travel about the world providing me with purchase opportunities that I want – when I need them. It is yet another disruptive paradigm for the world of advertising and media. Once we control who, when and where a brand communicates to us – the territory changes – to be relevant and of value to the consumer will become the new currency for advertisers and the great thing is – we will be their bank.