Special thanks to the 60 speakers and 515 attendees who made the ILM:09 conference such a great learning and socializing experience. Among the 85 conferences produced by John and Pam Kelsey and their team (including myself), we think it might have been one of the best.
In addition to the excellent, on-the-spot coverage of the event …

Reuters is reporting that both Idearc and R.H. Donnelley are close to completing their bankruptcy processes, and are planning to hit the ground running with plans to transform themselves from print-centric to multiproduct businesses.
The following quote from Idearc CEO Scott Klein about sums up what the Yellow Pages industry is facing over the next couple …

Money is tight in the VC community for local startups, with the dollar outlay down by 30-40 percent, and money raised just a third of what was raised in 2008, per research by Canaan Partners. There is also expected to be a sharp consolidation among sites that have received funding. But three top VCs speaking on the “Money Panel” at ILM:09 cited excellent opportunities in specific sectors of the local ecosystem, including retail, promotions, video and content aggregation.

The challenge is meeting a VC’s standard for advertiser and user volume – always a problem with heavily fragmented local services. Comcast Interactive Capital’s Michael Yang noted that he can’t seriously consider anything with less than one million unique visitors per month. Barring that, “We’re more apt to sit back and see if you can break through the ceiling,” said Yang, who formerly ran marketplaces for Yahoo. Still, Comcast is studying the market closely, especially “commerce and marketplace solutions, as opposed to pure directory plays.”

Patricia Nakache of Trinity Ventures echoed Yang’s interest in commerce and marketplace plays. She noted that most of the attention in local has previously been on Yellow Pages-oriented considered purchase. “What online hasn’t cracked yet is the impulse purchase,” which she calls “the new frontier.”

Citing as a prime example Groupon, a collective coupon site that just received $32 million in funding, Nakache said lessons from retail sites are soon going to be widely applied to local promotions and local advertising. She also sees opportunities in verticals and classifieds. The broad appeal of broad sites such as Craigslist will be complemented by verticals such as Care.com in the healthcare field. “There is an opportunity for a more curated experience,” she said.

Canaan Partners’ Warren Lee also looked for opportunities with verticals, especially in retail. “In the same way that ad networks evolved and became more vertical, we’re seeing similar things on the retail side. Broad sites like eBay will give way (or verticalize themselves) to more narrowly tailored sites, “especially as people become more capable of merchandizing things online,” and boost their “sophistication in marketing and attracting consumers.”

Lee says it all comes down to scaling audiences and expenses. He finds aggregated content especially compelling for this reason. Sites such as Associated Content, Demand Media and Examiner.com, for instance, have really brought out the long tail thanks to the “power of search.” Associated Content’s articles from 2005 made more money in 2008 than they did when they were first written, he noted.”It is a sustainable, highly scaleable model.”

The closing panel at the ILM:09 conference was a dialog between Peter Krasilovsky, program director of Marketplaces, and two seasoned luminaries from the world of journalism:
Geneva Overholser, director, School of Journalism, USC Annenberg School of Communication. She is also involved with the not-for-profit independent platform for “community funded reporting,” www.spot.us (supported in part by the …

How about that fourth screen? This growing media sector is projected to grow at an annual CAGR of 13.5 percent through 2013 with a total category take of $3.7 billion. But, trying to define what DOOH is and how to make it an effective part of any advertising campaign is still a work in progress. …

Mapping has become less about radius of where you are and more about what people define as local, how far people are willing to travel and the importance of certain events or locations in their community. While the advertising paradigm has focused on ZIP codes/postal codes, consumers identify more with neighborhoods or specific areas of …

Neil Budde of DailyMe and Mike Orren of Pegasus News helped the ILM:09 audience understand what it takes to offer a truly customized news offering that is engaging and relevant.
One of the key takeaways both Orren and Budde discussed was the idea that not everything can or should be customized on the news site. …

Aaron Finn of AdReady and Michael Barr of iPromote discussed the opportunity to serve advertisers interested in display advertising particularly in the self-serve environment. Finn noted that there are roughly 1.4 million businesses participating in search whereas there are only 44,000 businesses participating in display. He believes that there is scale for display and that …

Kicking off this afternoon’s Mobile SuperForum, BIA/Kelsey analyst Mike Boland walked through a number of key trends he sees affecting the development of mobile local search. These include rapid hardware improvement, the increasing local focus of mobile, the growing appreciate of mobile as its own form factor, and not just a mini-extension of the Web, …

Andy Sims of Skype shed some light on its new partnership with European Directories in which European Directories sells advertisers in its seven European countries a subscriptions package to deliver calls to that advertiser. Anywhere the advertiser’s phone number shows up on the Web it will be highlighted in blue and will indicate that by …

Chris LaSala, director, SMB reseller partnerships, Google, updated the audience at ILM:09 on how Google’s approach to local monetization is evolving.
LaSala walked through a number of new or recent product innovations that raised the ante in Google’s effort to make local advertising easy and effective for SMBs.
Here is some of what he shared:
Favorite Places. This …

Cory Bergman of MSNBC; Jim Pastor of ESPN Local and Kinsey Wilson of NPR Digital Media tackled issues related to how local “local” must be and what’s the best mix of national brands and platforms with local news and info.
As Kinsey said, it’s making sense for the national brands to lead with identity and …

BIA/Kelsey has been promoting the development of reputation management for some time now and sees this area as defining the local space in the next three years. On a panel this morning BIA/Kelsey analyst Matt Booth hosted a discussion that included three players in the reputation management space: Matthew Berk of Marchex, Ben Smith of …

In a wide-ranging interview this afternoon at ILM:09, ILM Program Director and conference chair Matt Booth tried several times to pin the Yelp COO, Geoff Donaker to the mat. But the unflappable and diplomatic Donaker just wasn’t going to go there.
Donaker spoke with surprising humility about Yelp’s phenomenal growth, from around 14-15 million uniques in …

 
Microsoft’s new MSN Local preview site is set to launch in 2010, Scott Moore and Cyrus Krohn announced on their “localizing the portal” panel at ILM:09. MSN Local will leverage Microsoft assets like its 100 million U.S. MSN users, Bing, Hotmail, and its new partnership with NBC-U and Hearst for 3,000 video clips in 36 …

BIA/Kelsey President Neal Polachek and SVP Matt Booth kicked off the ILM:09 conference by presenting BIA/Kelsey’s local revenue forecast and the state of interactive local media. The bottom line is that they continue to predict that local media will fall from $155.3 billion in 2008 to $144.4 billion in 2014, a CAGR of -1.4 percent.
They believe …

Kenshoo Search is the third-generation end-to-end search marketing platform that was “built utilizing the quality management approach.” Its USP is to enable marketers to optimize every aspect of their campaigns to achieve maximum ROI. At ILM:09, Sivan Metzger announced the formation of Kenshoo Local, an initiative for which he is the general manager. “SEM is …

Brian Buchwald, executive VP, local integrated media at NBC Universal, outlined how consumer preferences for local content are changing, along with the definition of local itself. Buchwald walked through NBC’s view of how local is changing, and how NBC is adapting to it. A key message was finding a niche in local is key. Being …

AgendiZe has rolled out a third-party online scheduling and booking tool that allows publishers to sell SMBs booking and appointment capability via their IYP listing with a widget they can drop onto their own Web site or into an e-mail marketing campaign.
The service offers an open API, so existing online scheduling services can adapt their …

Today marks the last day that AOL will have a corporate connection to Time Warner, as the two companies officially separate on Dec. 10 and a new AOL emerges on the New York Stock Exchange as a separate company.
Over the past several weeks, AOL has been aggressively moving to put the merger with Time Warner …