In the afternoon session at the BIA/Kelsey DMS conference on Wednesday afternoon, two players in the local search industry talked about the growing local display market and the use of display by SMBs. Moderated by Matt Booth of BIA/Kelsey, Tyler Bosmeny from PaperG and Warren Kay from iPromote spoke about the increasing use of display …

While this news has been out for a little while, we thought it was interesting that a company with powerful TV assets would initiate a deal with a company that provides high-quality, affordable video commercial content for local advertisers. After all, isn’t this what TV has been doing since the ’40s. What gives?
Anyone who’s ever …

AT&T Interactive announced this week the launch of in-app ads on its mobile ad network, an extension of YP Local Ad Network. In-app local ads are served within mobile apps based on a user’s location. Earlier this year, AT&T Interactive piloted in-app advertising and reported generating more than 750 million local ad impressions in three months. …

Over the past year, American Express has embarked on a series of initiatives centered on digital advertising intelligence for SMBs. These include SearchManager (via Clickable) for SEM and multiple social media experiments with Facebook and Foursquare. Now, its small business-focused OPEN division is rounding out the suite with AdManager, which utilizes AdReady’s dynamic display capability …

BIA/Kelsey moderated a panel on “the Out-of-Home User Experience” (click on image for link to streaming video) at MediaPost’s Digital Out-of-Home Forum (DOOH) in New York. DOOH is the third-fastest growing ad medium after mobile and online video.
Paul Lindstrom, senior VP, Nielsen OnLocation, kicked off the panel with data showing video engagement is about 80 percent …

CityGrid, the local content and advertising network announced today its plans to team up with CBS Local Digital Media. The new partnership gives local businesses the opportunity to be featured across CBS’ television and radio websites in major markets, thus gaining exposure to millions of online and mobile consumers.
“A media powerhouse like CBS has deep …

In the first of many possible partnerships with local media companies, Centro has teamed up with Morris Digital Works to create a network that allows advertisers to place geo- and vertical- based ads across a broad spectrum of local and national sites. Other local media partners are likely to team with Centro on similar networks. …

The Scandinavian directory and local search player Eniro has unveiled a pay-per-click advertising network, which it calls Scandinavian Ad Networks. The product leverages traffic from Eniro’s own properties (including eniro.se, gulesider.no, krak.dk, and kvasir.no) as well as third-party partner sites to feed the network.
This launch is part of Eniro’s strategy of becoming a dominant player …

Just days after consolidating Adify and Cox Cross Media into the integrated advertising network Cox Digital Solutions, the company is making waves again. This time, it’s acquiring in order to expand scale by scooping up IB Local Network from Internet Broadcasting Systems, which serves more than 2,200 Web sites.
Internet Broadcasting already directs many of its …

As my colleague Jed Williams has previously written, Yext’s Tags initiative is a big one, going up against Google Places with a broad (and “open”) network of 20 participating Internet Yellow Pages and online directory sites, including AOL’s MapQuest and Patch, Citysearch, Superpages, Yahoo and Yellowbook.
Yext CEO Howard Lerman describes Tags as “full-time, real listing …

TBD.com, the Washington, D.C., hyperlocal news site branding the online operations of Allbritton Communication’ WJLA-TV and Newschannel 8 under the TBD umbrella, is tabling its local ad network, citing limited advertiser interest.
The site currently has agreements with more than 200 blogs and local sites (up from 120 at launch in August) to link to their work …

There is a lot going on in online media on the East Coast evidenced by the panel on geolocation here at the Internet Summit in Raleigh, North Carolina, sponsored by TechMedia and Southern Capital Ventures. Geolocation continues to be major news given the press coverage of Gowalla, Foursquare, Google and Facebook, which are all chasing …

CityGrid Media (formerly Citysearch) will extend its paid base of 800,000 advertisers across thousands of neighborhood news pages, courtesy of a display advertising deal with Outside.in. The two companies have been quietly conducting pilot tests of custom ads in “a couple” of markets, leading to the wider rollout.
Outside.in CEO Mark Josephson tells us that the …

One of the big hopes for local this year is … national. As local targeting tools get more granular, there has been an upsurge in national/local advertisers, especially as they focus on touching consumers on the local purchase level. Gannett Digital and MediaBrands’ Geomentum, for instance, are both riding the crest of national-local activities.
Gannett …

As “the media capital of the world,” New York is rife with daily newspapers, high-culture magazines and lifestyle publications, yet Trevor Sumner says he had “no idea what was going on in my neighborhood. I couldn’t even keep up with restaurants in the East Village.” That lack of district-level information inspired NearSay, a start-up site …

In its latest evolutionary step away from a destination site (Citysearch) and into a full-service advertising network, CityGrid Media is debuting its private-label reseller program to give sales teams another touch point with local businesses by allowing them to sell CityGrid’s advertising products directly.
The program gives sellers a content-centric offering — Citysearch’s business profile page template, which …

We had the opportunity to sit down with industry leader MediaTrust to understand the major changes in the in the performance marketing (pay-for-results) category and the challenges of developing a cost-per-lead (CPL) model.
MediaTrust began as an affiliate marketing company, but was continually challenged by the deceptive practices of many affiliate marketers and publishers. Understanding …

With Google TV Ads’ announced partnership to auction inventory across 11 national networks carried by DirecTV, the search giant begins to try to rebut skepticism about its ability to achieve significant reach. Now it must demonstrate the ability to generate healthy revenues, driven largely by SMB platform adoption, to avoid the pitfalls it suffered in …

The Sacramento area is fast becoming Ground Zero for local blog networks. McClatchy’s Sacramento Connect, a project carved from The Sacramento Bee, is a content connector for 70+ area blogs and Web sites. It started incubating last summer and was fully in place by March.
Connect, which is subtitled “best of the local Web,” can …

 
Yellowbook had signed on to a new local ad exchange launched today by Chitika, an ad network established in 2003 that serves more than 2 billion monthly impressions across 80,000 Web sites. The core idea is to apply the ad exchange model to the local and mobile space.
For Yellowbook, the exchange offers a way to better …