Permission marketing is dead (as we know it) - all hail position marketing instead.

Despite my own mischievous activities in Gowalla and even some digital flashmobbing, I love playing the Gowalla game. There is something silly fun about checking in to a site, and being rewarded with a little icon. When these icons become tickets for real life discounts, it'll be even more rewarding. Gowalla has the potential in becoming the GPS-tuned position marketing media channel, forget permission marketing, here's a slew of users who actually go and get your ad, when they are nearby. If they aren't faking their GPS location, that is.

Beyond Gowalla, but with GPS and all your preferences intact, the future is a personal minority report of advertising as information you want, served when you need it. Point of purchase advertising is morphing into position advertising. Kunur Patel predicts the future in "Forget Foursquare: Why Location Marketing Is New Point-of-Purchase" on Adage. It's an interesting read.

It's the ad served while you are reading the news in the morning on an e-reader that knows you're at home and three blocks from a Starbucks. It's a loyalty program on your phone that, through a hotel-room sensor, sets the lights and thermostat and turns the TV to CNN when you walk in the door. It's finding a restaurant in a strange city on a Tuesday night, discovering that a store nearby stocks the TV you're looking for, or that a certain grocery on the way home has the cut of meat you need.
Forget Foursquare or Gowalla: Soon every website and service will be able to tell where you are, opening up the floodgates for location-based marketing and blurring the budget lines for advertisers.

We've seen position based marketing on cellphones before, with SMS ads and bluetooth advertising that would let shops nearby alert your phone about discounts It's with apps like Gowalla we'll get the attention of punters who want to play along. I think this is the important difference, as nobody was that keen on getting sudden texts from the coffee-shop they just passed. That felt like an intrusion, like being stalked by the advertiser. Games like Gowalla requires the punter to open the app as in: "hey I have a few seconds to kill here," and that's when you can bribe them with a cute icon that lets them shop at Barney's across the street at 15% off. The advertiser is actually playing along. The permission is already cleared when the player joined, and it won't be that hard to suss out what they like based on where they check in. Gowalla is a untapped goldmine. (a.k.a please don't close my account, sorry about the "hacking" ;) kthxbye)

Watch for more social gaming apps coming in the near future, all with the potential of morphing into your own personally tailored ad-server.

Update Tuesday @awolk has ideas on this too, What Location Based Services Need To Do Next and here's my favorite suggestion;

As the FourSquares and Gowallas grow, they’ll need to figure out ways to make it easier to check in. That can be anything from auto-check in alerts you set yourself (e.g. “You are at Starbucks again? Do you want to check in?” to sponsored auto-check in alerts (e.g. “You are at Starbucks again. Do you want to check in and save 50 cents?”)

Hum with me, money money money, moooney!