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The other day I received an e-blast advertisement from Maxpoint, a company that specializes in hyperlocal advertising (i.e., digital ads campaigns that target a specific demographic in a small geographic area). The subject of the ad involved running “…ads that speak to the weather conditions your shoppers are currently experiencing.” Yeah… I’d say that’s hyperlocal. Then there’s geofencing, a marketing technique that uses GPS data from your mobile device to send you a digital ad (and possibly an offer) based on your close proximity to the advertiser’s retail location. Again, pretty darn local, don’t you think?

This got me to thinking about all of the data that are being collected on each of us – by retailers and e-tailers, that is, and not the nice folks at the NSA. It’s only a question of time before we, as marketers, will be able to take all that’s known about an individual’s personal preferences, interests, buying habits and other demographic tidbits, and cross-correlate it with their present location, environmental conditions, and whatever else is handy, to build a snapshot profile of their immediate needs and retail vulnerabilities.

Say it’s a cold day in late Autumn, we know you’ve been Googling ski clothing but haven’t bought any as yet, and you’ve got plane tickets for a trip to Vail in three weeks. How hard will it be to text a special offer that will lure you into the Dick’s Sporting Goods store you’re about to walk past? Or we know you like to eat sushi for lunch at least once a week, but always at the same place. We can hit you with a special offer from a competing restaurant while you happen to be passing their door around noon. In fact, based on your past habits, we can even tell what kind of pitch (price, quality, etc.) you’re most likely to respond to. If “micromarketing” means advertising to a small group of tightly targeted consumers, what do we call this?

Okay, I Googled the term “nanomarketing” and most of what came back were references to India’s Tata Motors and some ill-fated attempts to market the tiny, inexpensive Nano automobile. So this seems to be an acceptable name for marketing campaigns that don’t just drill down to the level of the individual consumers, but also to what can be reasonably inferred about their state of mind and personal needs at any given moment. The right message, to the right person, in the right place, at the right time – marketing Nirvana!

Before we get too excited about the possibilities nanomarketing could represent, there are some cold realities that need to be considered. First, current FCC regulations ban text messaging using an autodialer unless the recipient has opted in, or the message relates to an emergency situation. Now there might be some sketchy ground here, based on how you define “autodialer” – but you can be sure that if a loophole exists it won’t take too long for the FCC to close it.

A more important issue is overload. Texts from preferred retailers whose app you downloaded specifically to receive their alerts is one thing; opting into a general, wide-open list that allows anyone text market you is quite another. Who among us is likely to opt into, or stay on for long, a list for receiving unsolicited “relevant text offers from a select group of partner companies”? I mean, how lonely does someone have to be?

Even if a marketing firm could build a substantial, open opt-in list with which to work, how many sales-related text messages will the average consumer be willing to tolerate during the course of a day? It shouldn’t take too many before it becomes undesirably intrusive and more than a bit like being stalked – in other words, a nuisance begging for an opt-out.

Geofencing, hyperlocal campaigning, and similar mobile-based, micromarketing techniques still deal with targeting groups based on shared demographics. The move to nanomarketing (or whatever it winds up being called) penetrates the relative anonymity provided by the group to target the individual, leveraging knowledge of their prior behaviors and current situation to sell them something. That’s a big step to take, and one that exposes a marketer to potential backlash if not handled with discretion and restraint, and a sincere respect for personal privacy.