Pushing hard on “multimedia” capabilities to sell national ads on 1,200 local radio, TV and newspaper Web sites, Media Span and Broadcast Interactive Media  mostly known as Web enablers and sales consultants  are teaming up to provide a one-stop shop for national advertisers.
While the network is a good idea, there is little that …

One big trend we’ve noticed for both Yellow Pages and newspapers is a renewed emphasis on the dynamics of cities served. We used to worry all the time about local dynamics as city guides and others tried to figure out which cities had “the most cyber-savvy residents,” “the most recreational activity,” etc. As the Internet …

As Peter Krasilovsky reported last week, Citysearch will establish new Atlanta-based sales digs. Kevin Newcomb over at Search Engine Watch points to a ClickZ article today about the expansion.
The company hopes to have 180 sales (inside, outside and national) people stationed there by June, which should help to capture a greater share of the small …

I missed this late last week because I was out, but AT&T has fired the latest shot in the bundled services (or “quad play”) battle by offering free wireless calling to landline phones. In other words, it’s free when Cingular (soon to be “AT&T”) users call landline phones (no minutes are eaten up), and vice …

The Observer has an interesting story about Hyper-Localism. This idea has several manifestations. In one version a newspaper creates Web content around niche groups like high school football teams or cats in trees and the brave city workers who save them. Another version of hyper-local involves a new print product. Here the idea is to …

IAC’s Citysearch has opened an inside sales center in Atlanta as part of a major sales push that also includes the development of a national sales team. There are currently 60 inside sellers in the center, and more than 150 sellers are expected to be in place by June, in addition to 30 support staff. …

The European Interactive Advertising Association released portions of a study showing increases for online conversion rates across several categories. The chart below, part of the release, shows the product categories with the fastest growing “conversion rates” from 2005 to 2006.
The conversion rates in this study are measuring the percentage of people that research online and …

There are a lot of reasons why Yellow Pages will continue to be the dominant local advertising vehicle. Certainly a major benefit Yellow Pages publishers have is that advertisers and people looking to buy products and services both know a directory is the one place they can go to find each other. With few exceptions …

Oodle, the listing aggregator service, is completing its transition from a Google dependent site with the rollout today of a comparison feature for autos. Real estate and rentals will be rolled out next. In October, Oodle made its first move away from Google reliance by establishing a “featured listings” program that charges the top three …

Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune (aka “The Troika”) have now weighed in on the controversy generated by the revelation that they are working on a national ad network that will compete with a national ad network being created by Yahoo! and 240-plus allied newspapers. The fallout of GMT’s announcement is the sense it is deliberately splitting …

Local.com continues to expand into related local search verticals announcing a partnership with Oodle.com. Strategically, the addition of classified verticals to local search platforms has driven incremental consumer usage as users navigate across the two offerings.
According to Heath Clarke, CEO of Local.com: “Oodle has good breadth and depth of listings across a wide number of …

There’s been more industry feedback on the “Open Network” for national advertising that Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune (GMT) have proposed to launch for the newspaper industry. The first question is: Who leaked it to reporter Julia Angwin and why? There is some feeling that the leak didn’t come from GMT and in fact probably came …

An executive at AT&T has informed me that an internal communication went out saying that BellSouth Advertising & Publishing President Ike Harris is leaving the corporation. Denny Payne, who has been president of SBC Directory Operations/AT&T Yellow Pages for the past six years, will be the CEO of the combined Yellow Pages business, which will …

Amid the endless and effusive praise of Apple’s new iPhone, Good Morning Silicon Valley’s John Paczkowski offers a refreshing reality check about some of the things the device is missing, “questions that are now emerging as the hypnotic pull of CEO Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field fades.”
Scratch resistance and lack of expandable memory and replaceable …

Last week, we linked to a Search Engine Guide Piece by Jennifer Laycock that outlined some of the challenges that small businesses face in devising and executing online ad buying strategies. Today, Laycock takes a closer look in her article “The Elephant and the Gecko, Why Small Business Can Win the PPC Battle,” which points …

There has been a lot of talk in the past week over some of the apparent challenges facing local destination sites. Last week, BackFence endured a major downsizing, including the resignation of cofounder Susan DeFife (past writing on BackFence and DeFife here  scroll down for full archive).
Michael Arrington at TechCrunch meanwhile takes a look …

The blogosphere is abuzz over the iPhone. Lots of claims that it will be a game changer in mobile search and entertainment. Apple certainly sees the potential of the device, and correctly anticipated the killer app of mobile devices by baking in Google and Yahoo! online services (mail, maps, search, etc.)
Mobile local search has been …

Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune (GMT) are shaping an “open network” to sell national online advertising, possibly replacing McClatchy’s Real Cities. The article says that network members are committing around 10 percent of their banner ad space to the network, and hope to announce a rollout “early this year.”
To be …

Microsoft announced today that it is partnering with aerial and satellite image provider GlobeXplorer to enhance Virtual Earth with 400,000 square miles of U.S. high-resolution aerial imagery coverage.
Virtual Earth is built on Microsoft’s MapPoint Web service and is the mapping engine behind Microsoft’s Windows Live Local and Live Maps.
This deal will combine GlobeXplorer’s aerial and …

Steve Jobs’ Macworld Keynotes are among the most awaited tech events of the year, as some of the products historically announced (iPod, for example) have represented inflection points in consumer technology.
Today at Macworld, Jobs introduced the long awaited iPhone. Speculation of such a product has been swirling for over a year, and rumors really kicked …