For anyone who paid attention to the 2008 Boston Marathon, there was a unique technology put in place for the first time that turned out to be a great mobile-based marketing campaign in and of itself.
A company called MyAthlete recently licensed a GPS technology from a company called GTX corp and incorporated it into a small lightweight device that could be placed on every runner. The accuracy of the GPS technology allowed friends and family to locate and track a runner at any given time.
To track, all people had to do was login to the MyAthlete portal on either a PC, laptop, PDA, or web-enabled cell phone and see in real-time where everyone was throughout every point of the marathon.
On the mobile marketing side of things, MyAthlete reported that the GPS units generated an unprecedented amount of traffic to their portal throughout the marathon…
“…on average, each runner’s device was followed by more than 10 unique viewers, generating traffic 1,300 times over their average server load. Once inside the portal, MyAthlete observed that visitors were likely to navigate their way around the main site and selected to view industry-related links hosted on the site…”