If you’re planning to be at next week’s NAB Show in Las Vegas, please look us up. During A Fireside Chat with Facebook and Google: Partnerships and New Ventures, I will interview Kay Madati from Facebook; and Bright Parks and David Gehrig from Google about new ways local stations can be benefit from working with …

Sabrina Alimi, IAB’s senior manager of Industry Initiatives spoke today at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local Conference. Alimi reported that, “IAB’s Local Committee has been looking at three areas – local search; mobile location; and data transparency.”
For local search, the committee is concerned with business listings and discoverability. IAB’s goal is to have more businesses show …

Native advertising was on stage today at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local Conference. Chris Cunningham, CEO, appsavvy and Jeff Moriarty, VP Digital, The Boston Globe spoke to reimagining advertising by integrating ads and content for a seamless experience.
Cunningham spoke to native advertising’s value proposition,”We believe this is premium inventory because it creates a better user experience.” …

Shane Vaughn, Chief Marketing Officer at Balihoo, spoke today at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local Conference and shared findings from a new CMO Council research study on how national brands will leverage local channels to activate local customers. The report can be downloaded here: http://balihoo.com/resources/cmo-council-report.
How important is localized marketing to demand generation and revenue in your …

Al Jazeera’s apparent $500 million deal to acquire Current TV’s 40 million U.S. cable homes, as reported in the New York Times, essentially values U.S. cable network distribution at $10.25 per cable home. Is this transaction a good deal? And perhaps more interestingly, what does it mean for how traditional media like cable versus digital …

BIA/Kelsey’s Local Commerce Monitor of SMBs shows that in our core sample (up to 100 employees, no minimum ad spend level), the number of marketing media used for advertising and promotion is on a path to double in 2013. The trend in our annual survey series shows the number of media used increased from 3.0 …

As I argued in a recent TV Technology article, “It’s inescapable that today’s video consumer expects cross-platform access to content. If that’s where the audience and advertisers are, then broadcasters need to be there, as well. What broadcasters need to do is create a positive experience for their audiences and advertisers as seamlessly as possible, …

What is “native advertising”? A Google search returns 109 thousand hits for a term that is just over a year old. Some credit Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson with coining the term in September 2011. Wilson argued at the time that advertising leveraging the native capabilities of a device or medium and fit the content …

Verve Mobile’s CEO Tom MacIsaac is bullish on local publishers’ ability to drive this revenue growth by selling local audiences not just to local advertisers but also to national brands seeking access to local audiences in a trusted context, through partners like Verve.
The secret sauce is Verve’s ability to deliver quality location-based audiences into a …

From iPad apps to cross-media daily deals to paid firewalls to local ad networks, leading newspaper companies have shifted their revenue mix as they develop their plans to keep them as local leaders. Mike Hodges, President/COO of U-T San Diego and Jim Moroney, Publisher/CEO of Belo’s Dallas Morning News shared how they’re essentially operating living …

The UK local newspaper industry has been a segment in decline as companies worked margins by cutting costs in an attempt to keep air flowing under the wings as they faced declining revenues. Where does this leave the future of local and regional news? This week, we got a glimpse of this as a new …

Pay for Performance is the Holy Grail in SMB advertising. SMBs only want to pay for leads that their advertising programs deliver. But moving SMBs from inclusion to performance has never been easy. Recent progress in lead quality assessment has been critical in moving performance media closer to the mainstream, as has the movement toward …

“Yes!” say University of Virginia’s Darden Business School professors Rajkumar Venkatesan and Paul Farris. The 99 percenters who fail to redeem coupons they receive in fact do matter. Their new  research to this point is summarized in this month’s Harvard Business Review.
In 2010, U.S. consumers redeemed 3.3 billion coupons for $3.7 billion worth of savings, …

Speaker: Will Scott, Owner, Search Influence
Moderator: Michael Boland, Senior Analyst and Program Director
There is a lot of talk about social media being critical to the future of small-business marketing. But how do those currently working with small-business advertisers take advantage of the social revolution?
BIA/Kelsey’s Mike Boland shared some data to set the context in this …

Local Search Association — “Search Starts Here”
Headline Address: Christian Dwyer, Senior VP and GM, MapQuest
Moderator: Matt Booth, Chief Strategy Officer, ILM Program Director, BIA/Kelsey
AOL’s MapQuest has undergone many transformations over the years, changing owners, business models and leadership teams as it adjusts to new threats and opportunities. It has consistently survived and thrived through …

BIA/Kelsey’s chief strategy officer and ILM program director, Matt Booth, led a discussion with David Hornik, principal, August Capital, at ILM East.
Hornik has had an eclectic career ranging from computer music to intellectual property attorney, entrepreneur, and now venture capitalist and lecturer at Stanford’s business school.
From his vantage point and varied background, Hornik tries to …

Hundreds of millions of dollars have now been invested in interactive local media services. Venture capitalists are hot on the trail of new opportunities. At ILM East, BIA/Kelsey CEO Tom Buono and Scott Maxwell, Founder and Senior Managing Director OpenView Venture Partners [@scottnews] discussed the key opportunities and trends they see not only in interactive local …

As U.S. television broadcasters consider the future of their spectrum assets with pending auctions and the potential transfer to mobile telephony and Internet services, the embers of innovation in the local television industry are far from dead.
Television station group owner Granite Broadcasting Corp. has teamed with Motive, PLC, a U.K. firm, to launch a start-up …

Jason Angelides, OneTwoSee’s COO and cofounder, told us this second-screen start-up positions itself as a B2B play designed to augment and enhance the first-screen experience by adding social, data and interactivity. Angelides and CEO Chris Reynolds left Nokia/Navtaq last summer to found OneTwoSee and closed on the first $1 million in funding last December. This …

Gillian Heltai, comScore’s senior director, presented new search data showing that while local search is still growing, its trajectory is slowing down. She broke search into online and mobile.
Year over year, online search grew 9 percent online to 19.3 billion searches in Sepatember 2011. Of these searches, 2.8 billion are local. 10 percent of U.S. …