You plan your car journeys with MapQuest. You nose around property values through map-based websites such as OnOneMap.com. You even track your favourite celebrities’ movements in almost-real time by logging on to user-annotated mash-ups of Google Maps. So why wouldn’t the ad industry see you as a lost opportunity?

With web traffic to online mapping sites growing by around 20 per cent a year, and 85 per cent of us saying we use them, these sites have become the latest hot properties for marketers. The ad agency Universal McCann calls the emerging trend "mapvertising".

Because we concentrate intently when we are using these services, advertisers are rushing to fill our screens with sponsored listings and clickable logos. They are also becoming more creative in their attempts to engage us, with online navigational tools that turn geographic searches into deep branding encounters. Universal McCann talks of "interactive maptivities" and "mapvergaming". Translated, that means anything from clickable balloons popping up to remind you of a shop in a particular street, to entire games built around navigating a city centre.

The American bookshop chain Barnes & Noble has struck a deal with Google Local to mark its locations with clickable coffee-cup icons. To promote its Sedici car, Fiat has been working with Google Earth to create an international treasure-hunting game based on clicking on real-world locations to find hidden prizes. Adidas went mapvertising during last summer’s World Cup by posing football fans a quiz integrated into Google Earth.

The bottom line: expect map-based advertising to form the next online gold rush as businesses from restaurants to lingerie boutiques compete to place logos and product photos along the streets you are navigating through. But some marketers are also hoping that satellite imaging will offer other opportunities. Until now, an advertisement painted on a building’s rooftop was valued only if it distracted passengers on an aircraft. Yet with satellite photos allowing such ads to be seen on millions of home PCs, could rooftops be the next high-value advertising space?

Inspired by the high visibility on satellite images of the US retailer Target, some of whose warehouse stores have its large targets painted on their roofs, entrepreneurs such as Colin Fitz-Gerald in Massachusetts are pitching aerial images as the new way to reach the Google Earth or Microsoft Live Local user. "All the major worldwide web map services are snapping bird’s eye images of the world’s cities," Fitz-Gerald says. "All the world’s prime blank roof space is going to waste." His business, RoofShout, is designed to change all that.

But there are downsides to this new promotional opportunity. Because there is generally no way of knowing when the satellite will be snapping images overhead, sometimes it is not just corporate logos that end up on the online mapping services. Last month, a Dutch woman who happened to be sunbathing topless when the satellite passed discovered that her own assets were among the most-studied images on Google Earth. Now that’s what we call staking an acute position within the new ad landscape.

david.rowan@thetimes.co.uk

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