If you spend a few hours at your favorite neighborhood bar, you’ll be passively exposed to dozens of advertising messages without even noticing them—a coaster bearing an energy drink logo, a neon sign for a liquor brand, a beer brand’s schedule of upcoming football games and the like. Like banner blindness in the real world, people barely register the brands they’ve seen, much less engage with them.
But that’s about to change. At CES this week, location technology company inMarket is announcing a new product to make in-bar advertising a little more engaging and a lot more memorable. Through a partnership with AMI Entertainment, the inBar ambient intelligence platform will use beacons, the most accurate geo-location technology, to deliver a personalized experience to smartphone users inside bars, restaurants, casinos and nightclubs. The rollout begins now to over 23,000 locations in AMI’s network.