• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, April 14, 2015

Hoping to attract more brand dollars, Foursquare is rolling out Pinpoint -- a new ad platform that targets consumers based on the places they’ve been. With its “snap-to-place” technology -- which filters out inaccurate location data -- Foursquare is promising to deliver the precise places that brand audiences go in the real world.

At launch, participating brands include Samsung, FedEx, Coors Light, at&t, Olive Garden, Land Rover, and Wild Turkey Bourbon.

Through its ecosystem of apps, Foursquare is inviting publishers and advertisers to target its core audience and consumers nationwide. Using psychographic data, marketers and media companies can create custom audiences, and combine them with the location data provided by Foursquare.

The promise of location-based social networking has never been brighter. By 2016, 90% of smartphones will be enabled with GPS technology, and as a result, the global, real-time, mobile location-based advertising and marketing market is expected to reach $9 billion by 2017.

It’s no surprise, then, that Facebook recently began testing a new service that pops place-based information right into users’ News Feed. If successful, “Place tips” could challenge Foursquare, Yelp and other local ratings services.

Foursquare is still trying to regain its footing after making the drastic decision to divide itself into two distinct apps. One, named Swarm, does what people have long associated with the Foursquare brand -- it allows people to check in to physical locations and become the “mayor” of local establishments. Another more Yelp-like service took the Foursquare name.