The Wall Street Journal writes last month about geotargeting. While not new news, percolating into the business press no doubt took a fair mount of work from the Quova PR team. The article highlights the strengths: regional content targeting (to watch or not to watch the Red Sox depending on where you are), anti fraud and other measures. The money sentence:

Still, geolocation technology won’t pinpoint Web visitors’ locations beyond the city level, which won’t satisfy advertisers seeking to target potential customers by neighborhood or street.

Correct, indeed. Umibot has often-written about Urban Mapping’s geographically-modified keyword research tool (many enhancements coming soon) that can help overcome this technical limitation of IP-based geotargeting. However, simply being able to target at a local leavel, without considering inventory and advertisers, is folly. As Ian White discussed in a recent location-based services conference in Berlin, the debunking of the “local mobile Starbucks advertising” (nb, extremely tired example), whereby a person walks past a Starbucks and a coupon for a latte suddenly appears, is patently false–now and forever in the near future. But more on that soon…

UMI’s Ian White will speak at ad:tech in San Francisco, April 15-17, 2008. He will participate in a panel on local and mobile search

Umibot is thrilled to announce the addition of Steven Stern as SVP, Sales & Marketing. Effective immediately, Steven will drive business relationships for Urban Mapping’s Urbanware neighborhood, mass transit and GeoMods keyword research tool.

Steven brings 13 years of experience in web, mobile and print marketing and sales experience. In 1995 he entered the print advertising business by creating his own niche publication distributed on 5 college campuses in 3 states. He then began a career in the Yellow Page industry quickly rising through the ranks from sales representative to various senior sales management positions. In his last position for Yellow Book, Steven was responsible for managing the Yellow Book brand nationwide. More recently, he oversaw marketing, sales and business development for go2. This included responsibility for product management of over 320 award winning collegiate online and mobile local search websites that are part of the go2 local content network.