Mobile advertising company Placecast says that there are now 10 million active users on its ShopAlerts platform.
To be clear, many of those people probably don’t think of themselves as ShopAlerts users, because it’s a white label product — mobile operators and other customers can use the technology to power their own mobile offers programs, using ShopAlerts geofencing to deliver an offer when a customer is near a specific physical location (most likely a store). Still, it’s a sign that the technology is starting to attract significant consumer interest — especially since that 10 million number only counts consumers who have actually opted in to one of the programs and are now receiving alerts.
ShopAlerts partners include Telefonica’s O2 in Europe and American mall operator DDR. Its offers can be delivered across AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile in the U.S. Advertisers, meanwhile, include The North Face, Starbucks, Loreal, and Subway. CEO Alistair Goodman says he’s starting to see some patterns emerge across the various ShopAlerts campaigns. For example, he says that one of the keys to a successful campaign is to make sure that the offers are unique to the program, so customers know they “couldn’t have gotten them somewhere else.” When asked about differences between geographies (Placecast operates in North America and Europe), Goodman says there aren’t many, but notes that European consumers seem more willing to sign up for more frequent offers.
In addition to sharing the user numbers, Placecast is also announcing two new hires: CFO Will Peppo, formerly CFO of Google-acquired payments company TxVia, and new UK head Westley Gillard, formerly head of business development at Velti. According to Goodman, Peppo’s hire in particular a sign of Placecast’s growing interest in mobile payments — Goodman doesn’t want to build a payments platform of his own, but he does want to integrate ShopAlerts offers with mobile wallet technologies from other companies, and we should expect news on that front soon.