Beacons enable targeting based on a person’s precise location, meaning a department store could alert a shopper to a new collection from Michael Kors when she is near women’s clothes, or a laundry detergent brand could send a coupon to customers standing in front of its product. “The promise of beacons for retailers is you can finally tie an online persona to an offline persona,” says Vincent DiBartolo, vice-president of technology at Big Spaceship, a privately owned digital advertising agency. “They are no longer satisfied knowing we’ve got this much traffic on our website and this much value in sales. They want to know: this person was on my website and then they went to my store.”

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