Foursquare's First Television Commercial Airs Tonight On Bravo [Video]
First Google, now Foursquare. Hot on the heels of Google's first Search television ad (run during the Super Bowl, no less), the location-based social network Foursquare is gearing up to do the same thing tonight.
Context & Ripple Effects
The ad is the payoff to Foursquare's January partnership with Bravo, which until now has been about in-app badges and show tie-ins rather than paid promotion — tonight it becomes an actual broadcast buy on the network. TechCrunch frames it explicitly as Foursquare following Google, whose first-ever Search TV spot ran during the Super Bowl weeks earlier.
The timing matters against the backdrop of Facebook's looming move into location flagged last November: a check-in startup with a fraction of Facebook's reach is spending on mass-market television to widen its audience beyond early adopters, after extending to Android back in September.
First-order effects
- Foursquare gains a prime-time Bravo audience for its brand tonight, converting the network partnership from co-marketing content into direct consumer advertising.
- Google's Super Bowl spot and Foursquare's spot together normalize TV as a legitimate channel for web-native brands that previously grew through press and word of mouth alone.
Second-order effects
- Competing location-based services now face pressure to match broadcast spend or cede mainstream mindshare before Facebook's geo product arrives and resets expectations for scale.
- TV networks gain a new buyer category — venture-backed consumer startups — which could price traditional advertisers' inventory differently if the pattern spreads.
Third-order effects
- If check-in apps must buy television to survive against Facebook-scale incumbents, location-based social networking consolidates around whoever can fund both product and mass media, squeezing out sub-scale players.
- The episode marks an early instance of the broader shift in which consumer internet companies treat broadcast as a growth channel, reversing the assumption that web products grow purely virally.
The trend: Web-native consumer startups are turning to television advertising to cross from early-adopter niches into mainstream households, with Google's Super Bowl spot as the template and Foursquare among the first followers.