Month: November 2010

Today, I was bored so I went to the airport.  (I know… I’m kinda random)
It was there that I noticed that there was an ad for the Sauder School of Business.  I then remembered seeing an ad for a Hong Kong business school at the Hong Kong airport.

Why do business schools put their ads in airports?

I’m thinking that their target market probably consists of:

• prospective students (people looking for BCom, MBAs, or other professional degrees)
• business professionals (networking opportunities for their own students)

Having an ad at the airport would enable a business school to reach international audiences in ways that placements elsewhere would not.

I was in accounting class the other day with Catherine Hsu, when she showed me this really cool application on the iPhone and since I wanted to find out more, I looked up her post about it on her blog.

Now, instead of marvelling at the awesomeness that is the Google app, I’m wondering about the wealth of information that Google could get from these applications!

As soon as I opened the app to take a picture for searching, it prompted me to agree to certain terms and conditions as well as asked if I wanted to save search history.  No big deal… until it said that it would save this data for use later on to improve the app and stuff like that.

Now, imagine how useful that information would be to marketers.  Search engines are very good indicators of social trends (such as Justin Bieber being one of the top searched terms of 2010) and adding picture/sound search that would just bring things to a whole new level!

I find it kinda scary.