Foot Traffic + Native Content

I recently moved to NYC. I started using Swarm daily lately. It’s a fun app. Unsurprisingly, the more you invest into a service, the more you get out of it long term. For instance, I have been investing a lot into Pocket for quite some time and happily reaping the benefits now.

I think same would be true for Swarm and Foursquare apps.

Today, I read an excellent piece on a topic that’s widely talked about but nothing is really done about it. I am talking about banner ads within apps and on websites. We all know they are annoying for us and we also know that they do not make for a good revenue source. That being said, they still linger on.

As a part of my unsolicited ideas series, I thought I will share an idea that I was thinking about yesterday. I think Foursquare’s incredible data gathering capabilities that are used for ad targeting are not fully utlized. All this data on foot traffic eventually transforms into mostly banner ads for advertising purposes that no one cares about. I think there’s an opportunity here for integration between great native content and Foursquare’s data. I would much rather have a targeted native piece of video content on Twitter about great beers than an annoying banner ad if my foot traffic shows that I regularly go to bars.

This would make for both better user experience and effective usage of such incredible data.