LAS VEGAS — The future of mobile marketing is not a distant dream – it’s here and now.

Whether it is vendors like PlaceIQ or Ubimo, marketers now have ways they can use consumers’ real location data in ad buys.

But Foursquare’s founder wants you to know that the pioneering location-sharing app has been offering this capability for years – it’s just that not enough people realize it.

“Data and technology (is) able to help developers figure out, when a phone moves to a certain spot, has this phone ever been here before?,” Dennis Crowley told Beet.TV, in this interview recorded at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Retargeting consumers based on web browsing behaviour is nothing new. But latest tech lets marketers target them based on the breadcrumb trails they lay down using their phones.

“What five stores was I in yesterday? … To be able to predict what three places would I like to go in the future, that’s new and rather magical,” Crowley says.

But this is not just a possible version of the future. It’s something advertisers can undertake today, says Crowley, perhaps smarting that advertisers are still only dreaming of potential future adoption.

“People don’t understand all the developer and enterprise tools we’ve been building,” he says. “We can do a lot of this stuff based on technology that people don’t think exists. You can do this now.”

Imagine a coffee shop trying to re-enable lapsed visitors, a supermarket trying to poach rivals’ customers, or a brand that only wants to pay for ads they know drove customers in-store.

“We can help you reach customers based off of where they bring their phones, we can help you predict what sales numbers may be based on global foot traffic trends we’re seeing,” Crowley adds.

“Target might want to market different types of products to people depending on where they’ve been in the past.

“We can tell you how many people saw (an ad), went to that place and then spent five minutes in your coffee shop.”

Sounds like a technology worth a check-in.

This video was produced as part Beet.TV’s coverage of CES 2017 presented by 605.  For more videos from the series, please visit this page.