What is advertising? Personalized gifts based on Tweets?

In a continued effort to question and define the business we work in, here is another edition of What is advertising?

KLM is the worlds oldest airline, so it's nice to see them taking on such a progressive marketing approach. The Netherland based carrier recently looked to location based social media to help strengthen ties with existing clients. KLM used Foursquare and Twitter to track down passengers who were waiting to depart and gave them small gifts based on their status updates.

For example one traveler was surprised by a KLM rep at Amsterdam Schipol Airport, just as he was about to board, with a voucher for the App store since he had updated his status from his iPad.    

The one-to-one aspect is nice, but the brilliance here comes from who they were targeting. The type of person who would let their network know that they're about to board a flight is the same type of person who'd Tweet about a warm'n'fuzzy moment with a big corporation.

Despite giving out a relatively small number of gifts, in the end this campaign garnered over a million impressions.