Pokemon GO is a glowing example of the hidden marketing potential inside an App.

Here are some statistics about the game since it’s release in the US so far:

Niantic quietly released Pokemon GO on the 6th July in New Zealand and Australia, shortly followed by a US release, and since then Nintendo’s stock has increased 21.76%. You don’t need to be an economics major to understand how insane that is. Its the strongest the Nintendo brand has been since 1983. Digital Vision says that 2 days since release in the US, the app was already downloaded on 5.16% of Android phones in the US; to put it in perspective, that doubles Tinder’s downloads. People prefer to game than to date apparently. It will not be long AT ALL till Pokemon GO daily users surpasses Twitter’s numbers. The most recent graph is here. Due to a limited region release, everyone outside of the US, Australia and New Zealand are bypassing the app-store rules on region-bound availability in their droves by using APK files. ‘apkmirror.com‘ – a popular APK site – went from 600,000 daily visits to 4,000,000 in the space of 24 hours. People just can’t handle waiting for their Pikachu.

Statistics like this are only going to be more and more ridiculous as the hours pass. Every hour Nintendo’s brand is going from strength to strength. Why? Because Nintendo did what was essentially the next obvious thing; bringing the Pokemon phenomenon – an entity that took over the world all those years ago when the cards and original games sauntered into the marketplace – to life. As in, real life. As in, you can now literally live inside your own personal Pokemon world, flinging Poke balls at Pokemon that now appear on your screen not just in tall grass, but classrooms, stadiums, motorways and drive-thrus.

So, we now have an app that is commanding millions to dedicate a large amount of time on their phone, making users travel all around their cities and towns, meeting up in special geo-specific meeting points – Pokemon ‘Gyms’ and ‘Pokestops’ – to interact with each other and their mobile devices. Do you smell the same marketing opportunities I do? Of course you do; and if we do, you can bet your bottom dollar companies are descending like hawks on Nintendo and Niantic, throwing huge amounts of money their way to feature their company in the game. How? By having geo-specific meeting points Nintendo can command hundreds of users to arrive at one single location as a matter of necessity. You want to conquer that Gym? You have to go here, to this place. If I was a company like Starbucks for example, I would be shipping bars of 24 carat gold to Nintendo just to persuade them to have one of their coffee shops featured as a gym. Gyms = hundreds of visitors a day. Whilst you may not have their eyeballs directly, they are on their mobile device standing inside your shop; its an advertisers dream.

It’s going to be interesting to see how Nintendo play this one out in the coming months. They have only released the app in 3 regions – although their servers are taking a huge beating already – so their growth has not reached anywhere near its peak yet. My reckoning is that we are going to see huge investments by companies to get their shops featured as geo-bound features in the game and this will be an incredibly useful case-study in the benefits of geo-focused platforms in marketing. Snapchat filters move aside, we’ve got a new entry in the geometric advertising space and something as nostalgic as Pokemon ain’t going nowhere.