With the Apple Watch wide­ly expect­ed to launch in March of this year, with rumors that inter­nal devel­op­ment teams are under­go­ing the lat­ter stages of an exten­sive test­ing pro­gram to final­ize the prod­uct, the ques­tion on every­one’s lips is what oppor­tu­ni­ties the new tech­nol­o­gy will present? Among the new fea­tures of the are a num­ber of poten­tial oppor­tu­ni­ties for mar­keters to reach con­sumers with rel­e­vant, use­ful infor­ma­tion.

When the iPhone was first released in 2008, it found suc­cess in rein­vent­ing an already estab­lished piece of con­sumer tech­nol­o­gy while expand­ing and mod­ern­iz­ing the avail­able fea­tures of a device peo­ple were already using. In this sense, the Apple Watch seeks to do much the same.

While no offi­cial date has been con­firmed, the Apple Watch could see the mar­ket as ear­ly as next month (if a leaked doc­u­ment from Apple’s senior vice pres­i­dent of retail is any­thing to go by), and already the prod­uct is mak­ing a few head­lines for the inno­va­tions it will bring in the field of local-adver­tis­ing and dig­i­tal near-field trans­ac­tions.

The Hyperlocal Advertising Opportunity

One of the most excit­ing prospects of Apple Watch is in the vir­tu­al “screen real estate” it will bring to con­sumers. The intro­duc­tion of a new dig­i­tal screen in peo­ple lives, that unlike a smart­phone does­n’t pre­dom­i­nant­ly live in peo­ple’s pock­ets, presents a tremen­dous new oppor­tu­ni­ty for mar­keters in hyper­local adver­tis­ing.

Hyper­local adver­tis­ing uti­lizes the Watch’s built-in GPS func­tion­al­i­ty to deliv­er screen adver­tise­ments about busi­ness­es in close prox­im­i­ty. For exam­ple, a con­sumer walk­ing down the street could be alert­ed to a near­by cof­fee shop’s pro­mo­tion for a free drink, or they could be alert­ed to an avail­able dis­count or coupon code while brows­ing a store in order to encour­age a con­ver­sion – all deliv­ered seam­less­ly to a con­sumer via an unob­tru­sive wrist­watch alert.

Mar­keters have good rea­son to believe that an invest­ment in hyper­local adver­tis­ing will be reward­ing. A Sep­tem­ber report from Thinkn­ear found that hyper­local adver­tis­ing cam­paigns pos­sess the largest share of accu­rate ad impres­sions with 47 per­cent served in the U.S. in Q3 2014. This was up on Q2 fig­ures of 34 per­cent show­ing that it rep­re­sents mar­ket that is grow­ing fast.

A sur­vey on mobile adver­tis­ing my con­sumer research con­sul­tan­cy Nielsen found that 51 per­cent of U.S. mobile device users stat­ed that they pre­ferred mobile ads with geo­graph­i­cal­ly rel­e­vant info. It makes for an indus­try that has a lot of poten­tial to grow, and Apple Watch rep­re­sents the kind of tech­nol­o­gy that in time can trans­form such research into a mar­ketable real­i­ty.

Also, as report­ed by eMar­keter, Berg Insight also esti­mat­ed that invest­ment on mobile-loca­tion-based is set to increase to $14.3 bil­lion in 2018, ris­ing from a $1.6 bil­lion fig­ure in 2013.

How Is The Apple Watch Different?

TapSense, the mobile ad exchange plat­form, has released a ‘Pro­gram­mat­ic Ad Plat­form’ for the Apple Watch, aid­ing devel­op­ers, agen­cies, and busi­ness to serve adver­tise­ments and mar­ket on the tech­nol­o­gy.

“While most of our com­peti­tors are focused on ban­ner ads and lega­cy plat­forms, we are focused on inno­va­tion and next gen­er­a­tion plat­forms,” said Ash Kumar, Co-Founder and CEO of TapSense. “Apple Watch has the poten­tial to be a cat­e­go­ry dis­rup­tor sim­i­lar to iPod or iPhone and we believe that it pro­vides great oppor­tu­ni­ties for brands and devel­op­ers to deliv­er engag­ing expe­ri­ences to con­sumers.”

If Apple Watch gains the wide­spread adop­tion that has fol­lowed the launch of new Apple prod­ucts thus far, the hyper­local adver­tis­ing space could under­stand­ably expe­ri­ence a peri­od of strong growth and invest­ment. The inno­va­tions that the smart­watch brings to hyper­local adver­tis­ing and inte­grat­ed pay­ment sys­tems in par­tic­u­lar give us every rea­son to keep a close eye on the space.

3 Reasons Why Apple Watch Could Take Off in 2015

1. Inter­ac­tive inno­va­tions that rev­o­lu­tion­ize ban­ner adver­tis­ing: Ban­ner adver­tise­ments have been around for more than 20 years. As screen sizes have become small­er, new inno­va­tions in tech­nol­o­gy have been nec­es­sary to main­tain the rel­e­van­cy of the medi­um, and Apple Watch hopes that in pro­vid­ing inter­ac­tive inter­faces, tak­ing cues from GPS loca­tion data, glance recog­ni­tion, and seam­less full-screen tran­si­tions, the prac­tice will see a resur­gence of the chan­nel, serv­ing more rel­e­vant and use­ful infor­ma­tion to con­sumers.
2. Hyper­local tar­get­ing: Hyper­local adver­tis­ing is often report­ed in a high­ly favor­able light, and there is a great deal of data and reports being released that advo­cate the pow­er of the con­cept. How­ev­er, the prac­tice has yet to achieve any kind of wide­spread adop­tion, and this is per­haps due to the fact that when we do inter­act with our smart­phones it is to gen­er­al­ly to ful­fil a spe­cif­ic pur­pose. Apple Watch has the pow­er of func­tion­ing in the same way broad­er adver­tis­ing such as bill­boards or broad­cast adver­tise­ments do in rais­ing aware­ness and con­nect­ing new con­sumers, while also offer­ing low­er fun­nel incen­tives, such as coupons or dis­counts as con­sumers are close to trans­act­ing in brick-and-mor­tar stores.
3. Apple Pay Inte­gra­tion: Apple Watch also pro­vides full inte­gra­tion with Apple Pay. It means the poten­tial of a tru­ly seam­less expe­ri­ences for con­sumers, who are able to use the dig­i­tal wal­let func­tion of their phone to trans­act. TapSense points out that dig­i­tal pay­ment for offline pur­chas­es rep­re­sents one of the last touch­points of the con­sumer jour­ney to be effec­tive­ly tracked and dig­i­tized, mean­ing the pay­ment sys­tems could yield much more insights attri­bu­tion data in the near future.

How should brands be prepar­ing for the pos­si­ble dis­rup­tion Apple Watch will bring, and what do you think are the biggest oppor­tu­ni­ties in hyper­local adver­tis­ing?