BARCELONA — Mobile advertising has come a long way – but it could go a lot further if it truly used mobility as a core planning component. That’s one one mobile exec thinks.

“Advertisers don’t have access to cookies. They do have access to location data,” says Tyler Bell, product VP at Factual. “We have a location data set of all the world’s businesses and landmarks. We overlay user movement on top of those places.

“From longitude and latitude, we build user profiles that have demographic, geographic and behavioral data.”We can find places they return to over time and have an affinity to.”

For Bell, this development aims at “anticipatory computing” and personalization – the idea that, by understanding users’ movements as cues, providers can serve them relevant messaging.

Bell was interviewed by Beet.TV at the Mobile World Congress convention.