The news came over the wires this weekend  that Bob Pittman has been named as the new CEO for radio and outdoor giant Clear Channel Communications. Pittman, who is the opening keynoter at ILM West Dec. 12 in San Francisco, steps up from Chairman, Entertainment and Media Platforms.  Pittman is the first CEO of Clear …

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 …

Crushed by a “perfect storm” of debt and declining revenues, TMP, once the dominant player in the Yellow Pages agency (CMR) space, will cease to exist within a few days. However, we have learned that several of the agency’s more valuable local offices and their associated clients have been sold off to rival agencies.
According to one …

Publicar, S.A., a leading publisher in Latin America, announced today a deal with Virginia-based Ya Sabe, Inc. to provide local search for U.S. Hispanics at PaginasAmarillas.com. As part of the deal, YaSabe will operate the U.S. website. The company will offer local businesses and national brands an assortment of digital advertising products and services. In …

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. …

Mobile now accounts for a third of AT&T’s local search, according to AT&T President and CEO David Krantz, who was speaking at the Borrell show last week in New York. “We truly believe that mobile is bigger than the Web,” said Krantz, noting that AT&T has some significant head starts over rivals as a vertically …

We’ve been starting to see the signs of recovery for the past few months. Companies that have been cutting costs and back office expenses are now realizing they need to get the sales end of their businesses moving again. Throughout the recession, salespeople who could at one time demand higher base salaries, fringe benefits, signing …

Centro, a pioneer in local online ad placement for national marketers, has received $22.5 million in equity financing from FTV Capital. The money will go toward expanding its regional sales presence and also toward software development.
CEO Shawn Riegsecker tells us that he anticipates adding six to eight regional offices to its existing roster of …

The ability to track retail inventory has been on the retail wish list for years. Retailers advertise goods, and then disappoint customers when they don’t have them in stock. Or they have loads of stock in the store, and don’t know they need to promote it to deplete it. Or they have a lot of …

While 2010 has been lauded as “the year of local,” it has also seen an influx of interest and spending by national brands to drive neighborhood-level store traffic. These initiatives have taken diverse (and sometimes highly publicized) forms: Gap’s deal-a-day offer through Groupon, Best Buy’s mobile check-in experiments with Shopkick, and a host of real-time inventory …

Leading off the day at the Internet Summit, Chip Perry, CEO of AutoTrader, revealed that the company’s main business focus is not on e-commerce but on filling the gaps in the consumer shopping experience and providing valuable tools for sellers.
“The Internet was supposed to change the buyer-seller interaction,” Perry noted. “But AutoTrader kept in …

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 …

Yes, we have heard that officially the recession ended in the summer of 2009. Yes, the stock market has been showing renewed strength over the past few weeks. Yes, even housing starts and sales are showing some recovery.
But even with that good news, why do we still believe that the advertising marketplace will only see …

Show biz marketing accounts are huge, and their agencies are always looking for more ways to localize them. They’ve now inspired efforts by ValPak, the promotions giant, and Eventful, the local events site that boasts an audience of nearly 20 million users. They build on top of earlier local efforts by AOL Digital City, Yahoo …

The small-business market is always attractive to vendors in terms of volume, but many give up in frustration because of its fragmentation, low margins and high-service needs (and churn). Many of these vendors typically seek to move up the value chain to medium- and large-sized businesses. With these, they get both larger contracts and more …

Angie’s List, the premium ratings and review service for home and medical services, has announced that it has raised $22.5 Million from institutional investors as it prepares for an IPO within 18 months. Investors in this round include some public funds managers, including Wasatch Funds.   The company previously raised $48 million, making for a grand …

AdReady is an established presence in display advertising, serving up both creative automation and media campaign buying tools for agencies, publishers and advertisers alike. The Seattle-based firm has undergone a leadership change over the past year, however, and new CEO Karl Siebrecht wants businesses to be able to utilize AdReady at a more granular level for optimal audience …

Groups have been using the Web since the mid-1980s for a wide range of activities, such as scheduling, discussions, photo sharing, referrals etc. Groups have been a special strength for Yahoo.
BigTent, a group software company based in San Francisco, has recently been vying with Yahoo for the same market, focusing largely on women. It now …

Ad agencies have never really been a major part of the world of local online advertising. Apart from some geotargeting for their national and regional clients, they haven’t paid much attention to the many opportunities in local (geotarget banners, local search, couponing, directory and social).
Where there has been agency support, it has been largely on …