Foursquare Signs Media Deals

Foursquare has announced two media deals in the past week. The first was with Metro, the number one free newspaper in North America, which is also widely distributed across the globe. The deal will see Metro content published as tips shown to users of the service when they check-in at various locations. Initially the Metro deal is just for Canada, but it would be reasonable to expect to see this roll-out across the rest of the Metro coverage areas.

The second deal is with TV company Bravo. This is an extremely smart move on the part of Foursquare and clearly places them well ahead of their competitor services. The deal goes live on Feb 1st and will see Bravo celebrities sharing their tips for various locations. In addition Bravo will be offering badges and prizes for users that check-in at over 500 Bravo tagged locations.

Ellen Stone, Bravo’s senior vice president of marketing, told the New York Times that:

“We really want to tap into the power of Foursquare by engaging their audiences and bringing our Bravo viewers these unique experiences on a national level … We saw the Foursquare phenomenon taking off and we wanted to go along with them as they shoot into the mainstream … Our audiences is always looking for new and unique engagements and this is perfect for them.”

With the TV company putting its bandwidth behind Foursquare, we can expect to see various mentions of Foursquare throughout the Bravo programming schedule.

David Armano SVP at Edelman Digital asked the question yesterday on Twitter. Its a good question and it will make for an interesting answer. Even with $8.5m in investment it will be hard for Gowalla to catch Foursquare now.