During the session, ?Foursquare: Making Sense of Mobile, Marketers and Consumers and How 2016 Will Be Different,? the executive said that applying digital targeting to the physical world is one of the biggest advances that has happened in marketing. These developments point to how mobile is helping marketers look beyond buying media to buying specific behaviors. 

 

?We can take that information and we can reach consumers on a one-to-one basis or aggregate basis and apply that digital mentally of targeting based on reaching specific behaviors based on their activities in the physical world,? said Steven Rosenblatt, president of Foursquare. 

?It has been happening, but it is really now scaling,? he said. ?Marketers and agencies see the value, that they can learn about their segments and use new ways to target consumers that are more effective.?

Mr. Rosenblatt, who was previously chief revenue officer at Foursquare, was named president earlier this month. At the same time, the company?s chief operating officer Jeff Glueck was appointed CEO while co-founder and previous CEO Dennis Crowley became Foursquare?s executive chairman. 

With mobile and the ability to track consumers? activities in the physical world, marketers can now apply similar digital targeting to the physical world. 

Such a marrying of the physical and digital worlds has been talked about for several years, but all the pieces were not in place previously. 

?The infrastructure didn?t exist before,? Mr. Rosenblatt said. 

?Today, we can take the data and make sense of it,? he said. ?For a while, we were stuck in this stage of let?s collect a lot of information, but we didn?t know what to do with it. We were paralyzed.?

Most consumers today walk around with smartphones that have sensors and collect tremendous amounts of data about their environment. 

For marketers, the challenge is figuring out what they can do now with this data that they could not do previously to reimagine their relationship with consumers and create experiences that bring value. 

Mr. Rosenblatt recommends marketers focus on their core business and what they do best. From there, look for partners that can help them in areas that are not their core competency. 

For example, a retailer that sells consumer electronics might find partners who can help the business determine what its customers are doing before and after they enter the store.

Marketers may also need to throw out some of their legacy ways of doing things in order to put the focus on benefitting from the way mobile is changing the world, especially as phones continue to get faster, sensors are improving and connectivity extends to a wealth of everyday things. 

Businesses will face challenges in embracing mobile. 

For example, creating a really good application that will be downloaded and used repeatedly by a significant number of consumers is hard to accomplish and requires significant investment. This many not be the best strategy for all brands. 

It can also be difficult to choose the best partners out of the growing landscape of marketing services vendors. This particularly challenge could ease somewhat in 2016, per Mr. Rosenblatt. 

?In 2016, I think you will see a lot of companies not get funded and go under,? he said. ?I think it will start to decrease because there are too many point solutions out there that will start to consolidate.?