As location continues to garner a lot of buzz, more and more brands are thinking about innovative ways to use it for promotion. We’ve seen dozens of brands sign up with Foursquare to promote things, and they’re starting to embrace Gowalla in a major way too. The latest three are: Adobe, Chipotle, and the New Jersey Nets.
Today at his Where 2.0 talk in San Jose, CA, Gowalla CEO Josh Williams unveiled Adobe’s plan to use the service’s signature stamps to give away a dozen copies of their new Creative Suite 5 software. These stamps will be hidden in various places all around America. To find one, you simply check-in to a venue and it will appear on your screen. You can then hit a button to get the details for how to redeem it for a copy of the software.
Additionally, Gowalla is teaming up with the big Mexican food chain Chipotle to give users stamps at over 1,000 locations across the U.S. Currently, these stamps are just to pretty-up your profile, but eventually these are undoubtedly part of Gowalla’s larger plan to be able to trade these in for free items in stores.
Finally, the New Jersey Nets are working with Gowalla to give away 500 tickets to their final home game against the Chicago Bulls taking place on April 12. Sure, the Nets may be the worst team in the NBA, but it would still be hard to pass up on a free game.
Yesterday, I moderated a panel at Where 2.0 with both Gowalla and Foursquare on it, as well as Loopt, Plancast, and Twitter. All parties indicated brands being so interested in location at this point that they’re actually the ones approaching the companies about deals, rather than the other way around.