This week I attended the inaugural Location Based Marketing Summit in New York City.

The event featured an array of speakers from LBS platform companies like MyTown, Where, SimpleGeo and DoubleDutch to agencies like DeepFocus, VanyerMedia and Fleishman-Hillard

The quality and content was very good, despite the lack of much in the way of real case studies (New Jersey Nets and Booyah/Pantene and Deep Focus/HomeTurfFinder excepted)

Surprisingly absent was any representation from Foursquare, Google, Facebook or Twitter.

Here are some of the key take aways:

Game mechanics are a great way to grow LBS services.  Just look at Xbox Live and Farmville

People are now “media channels” LBS makes word of mouth marketing measureable

GPS is not proximity – there’s a difference between nearby and a specific location in a building

Where gets 11% response rates to ads driving traffic to the store

Placecast sees 25-65% redemption rates (fashion and retail)

Groupon is getting slammed on ability to drive sustainable traffic to stores beyond the initial offer

Media buyers are overwhelmed with choices. Consolidation and rate card are needed

Consumers will choose an LBS service that is complimentary to their lifestyle