Sensis has announced the offering of online auctions on its Trading Post Web site. According to an article in The Sydney Morning Herald: “some two million people already use the www.tradingpost.com.au site to buy and sell goods and services. The company now aims to attract a share of the additional 3.4 million Australians using online auction facilities. ‘Sensis has taken decisive steps to return our classifieds business to growth,’ ” said Bruce Akhurst, Sensis’ chief executive officer.

One of the key issues prompting the launch was eBay’s decision to require use of its PayPal system rather than allowing other forms of payment. “Trading Post has been listening closely and is now providing auctions with a broad range of payment options for sellers to choose from. We’ve also made it easier to register, buy, sell, navigate, search and compare products online,” said Akhurst.

EBay has enjoyed exceptional growth and success in Australia owning 42.2 percent of the online shopping and classified marketplace compared with Trading Post’s 2.12 percent, as reported by Hitwise. Sensis has made a significant investment in the new online auction business, adding phone and e-mail based customer service, a mobile version for Telstra users, side-by-side comparison options and 524 categories. The site is powered Intershop and the FAST platform.

The mashing up of classifieds with directories and other directional media, such as eBay, is a logical path for Sensis as online auctions are another way to bring together buyers and sellers. To maximize its opportunity, Sensis will not charge for listings but will extract a fee when the product is sold giving it a piece of every transaction. Monetizing the transactional aspect of directional media has been a goal of most every directory publisher.

Sensis’ Trading Post property has had less than stellar results, so the move into online auctions with a purely Australian focus (sellers must reside in Australia) is a wise one. Increasing its classified market share while creating a new revenue stream will help push Sensis toward its 2011 target of A$3 billion.

“Extraordinary change means extraordinary opportunity,” Merrill Brown, founder and principal of MMB Media, told the audience at last month’s Drilling Down on Local conference. Few people are more knowledgeable about the impact of new technologies on society than Brown. Before he was a founder of RealOne, before he was the first editor in chief of MSNBC.com, before he was a media and communications consultant for Time Inc., NBC and USWEST, he was a widely quoted writer. In 1983, he authored a story in the Washington Post about videotext. “Listen to this exuberant quote from Viewdata Corp. Vice President Norman Morrison, ‘We are at the beginning of home information technology. The whole world is watching South Florida. We are dancing naked on the stage of history.’ ”

Viewdata was a partnership between Knight-Ridder and AT&T and its primary product was Viewtron, which allowed consumers to access information and shop online. Early participants were J.C. Penney, E.F. Hutton and Ogilvy & Mather, and I was fortunate to represent AT&T in this trial in the late ’70s while working for AT&T. One of the people with whom I worked on the Knight-Ridder side was Mort Goldstrom, who is now vice president, advertising, at the Newspaper Association of America.

Including my colleague and conference host Peter Krasilovsky, at least four of us at the Drilling Down event had been involved in online information for the past 30 years. Mort was kind enough to send me a CD of some of the earliest marketing materials for Viewtron. In those days, the companies were trying to sell the wonders of a new technology: “Sometimes something happens that changes the way we do things,” or “Viewtron is for people who want to get ahead,” or (videotext) will change the way people invest or shop.

Today virtually everyone takes the Internet for granted and the gee whiz is all about new applications. Brown spoke of the death of the American newspaper and the fact that the television business has not shown real interest in the Internet. Visionaries like Craig Newmark of Craigslist “prove what a real entrepreneur can do … we all have opportunities to be entrepreneurs like him.” 

Brown was a teacher about new technologies long before the Internet became such a disruptive change for traditional media. He is still teaching those who will listen. 

Microsoft will announce a new Live Search product today at Advance08, which gives cash back to users who purchase products through the system.

The aptly named Cashback feature will place dollar sign icons throughout paid search results wherever there are deals available. Users who purchase these items will then have cash amounts transferred to a new section of their Microsoft LiveID accounts. There are currently 450 million worldwide LiveID accounts, though Microsoft does not break out the U.S. portion (this will initially be a U.S.-only rollout).

Microsoft is launching this functionality using technology attained from its October ‘07 acquisition of Jellyfish, a site that offered a similar feature. It will include 10 million product offers from roughly 700 retailers, including eBay, Barnes & Noble.com, Overstock.com, Sears, Zappos.com, and WPP (complete list here).

This is all done through an interesting mashup of CPA and PPC advertising with these retailers, explained LiveSearch General Manager Brad Goldberg in a meeting last week. Essentially advertisers will pay a combination of CPA rates that they determine as a percentage of purchase price (cash back amounts), as well as pay-per-click advertising for the listings throughout Live Search.

For the user, the benefit is clear. There are lots of online shopping engine choices out there with little differentiation, besides brand recognition for major retailers. Price can therefore be a primary decision factor, and this product seeks to differentiate Live Search on that measure. The degree of differentiation will represent Microsoft’s ongoing effort to win over users in the face of search engine loyalties or habits (read: Google).

This falls under Microsoft’s “commercial search” strategy, says Goldberg — the first of its four main areas of development to differentiate Live Search. These are commerce, entertainment, navigation and reference. It concedes to Google’s dominance in paid search but wants to lead in other areas. Part of the strategy will include a move toward more CPA advertising and user-centric tools like this.

The next ad-funded rebate will likely involve Live Search Farecast (also launched today). This will be the travel service under the Live Search umbrella, acquired through Microsoft’s April purchase of Farecast. The site finds low low travel fares using predictive modeling on the right time to buy.

Future developments in its commercial search strategy could also include inventory feeds and reserve online features for local items — a growing opportunity being tapped by NearbyNow and Krillion, among a short list of others. Goldberg acknowledges the opportunity but wants to stay focused on the e-commerce aspects of the Cashback program in the nearer term.

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Video footage of the announcement from Advance08 will be available here later this morning.

The final day of The Kelsey Group’s Drilling Down on Local conference featured a keynote by Merrill Brown of MMB Media. Brown is an industry guru with a history of developing groundbreaking media strategies and operations. Among other things, he has been editor-in-chief then SVP of MSNBC.com. He also created Court TV along the way.

Brown’s comments served as a fitting capstone for much of the conference – or given his morning time slot, perhaps I should say a prequel to the conclusion.

Brown thinks the various “revolutions” that are shaking up online market-making and marketplaces are in their early stages. Specifically, he believes:

• The newspaper industry is just beginning a period of wrenching restructuring (of its content strategy and business model).
• Verticals will continue to grow apace, to the point where online vertical markets will play a vital part of our quotidian online experience.
• Web 2.0 capabilities (e.g., social networking, video) will become closely woven into online markets.

What was most interesting about his remarks, however, was his overall tone. Brown spoke with the urgency of someone (a guru) who senses we’re in the early stages of a real revolution, and we need to be aware of the magnitude of the changes to come.

Local retailers are increasingly going beyond store locators to drive sales. The extensions to store locators include brand locators, coupons, menus, trip planners, and even guides to where Wi-Fi, nonsmoking and RV parking can be found.

A leading vendor in providing retailer solutions is Anaheim, California-based Where2GetIt. Roughly 280 companies and 550 brands are using Where2GetIt today, representing 700,000 brick-and-mortar locations. These include manufacturers, retailers, restaurants and agencies.

Brands that use Where2GetIt include such mainstays as Office Depot, Hancock Fabrics, Columbia Sportswear, Mountain Hardwear, Patagonia, Monster Cable, Mitsubishi Digital, Sony, ViewSonic, Outback Steakhouse, Red Lobster, Applebee’s, White Castle and Cracker Barrel. I ran across the firm looking for an Alpine car stereo, for instance.

The 25-person company got its start in 1997, when it won an assignment from Seiko to build online maps showing where its watches could be bought. Since then, Where2GetIt has extended its “locator” capabilities to a wide range of brand-specific products.

It provides a “turkey locator” for Popeyes Fried Chicken, a “running locator” for Reebok, a “pie locator” for Bakers Square and a “job locator” for recruitment firms. What ties them all together is a focus on helping consumers find brand-name products.

Where2GetIt CEO Manish Patel says the firm’s “Business Locator” continues to be the firm’s mainstay — typically one of the two most used features on a retail Web site. But the supplemental products have become increasingly important to the firm’s business model, which is based on licensing. For instance, adding coupons to Popeyes’ site doubled the chain’s Web site traffic, he says.

The firm’s other services tendered tend to be more strategic (i.e. future oriented). Firms such as Office Depot, for instance, use Where2GetIt’s mobile products. They include mobile locators, mobile browsers, SMS text messaging and toll-free 800 interactive voice response.

The firm is also heavily engaged in site analytics to drive sales conversion. “We try to figure out how far people will drive” using crowd sourcing and other techniques, says Patel.

The balance between merchants and brands is being shifted by the increasingly common use of enhanced “product locators,” which adds store locations, maps — and frequently promotions such as coupons — to the mix, says Lauren Freedman, president of The E-Tailing Group in Chicago.

Freedman has just completed a round of shopper behavior research for Krillion. The results, not surprisingly, reinforce Krillion’s mission of providing brand information, and now actual store inventory, to local shoppers.

The research’s key finding is that shoppers want to “see everything” and will look at multiple sources on the Web to find it, says Freedman. They especially want to shop online and pick it up at the store. She finds that merchants benefit from store pickup because consumers invariably add more to their shopping cart once they’re inside the location. On average, for instance, Circuit City brings in an extra $154 from such “cross-channel” shoppers.

Cross-channel shopping is increasingly being enabled by big-box stores, she adds. Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Sears, RadioShack, CompUSA each launched in the past six months. Increasingly, it is also having an impact on Main Street stores as well. Fifteen of 75 retailers surveyed, or 20 percent, now have a product locator on their site. A similar number had store pickup. “It is growing really fast. No one had it 18 months ago,” she says.

Freedman’s research also found that ratings and reviews are increasingly important, especially as the “local component” of the shopping experience. Generally speaking, women have especially seized on reviews, while men are more tied to the search engines.

“What people really want to know is the service element,” says Freedman. Besides price and inventory, “it is the only differential” at the local retail level.

One big takeaway from the NAA Marketing show last week in Orlando was that newspapers are ready to build up a zillion niche products that allow them to leverage their editorial talents. But not much progress, or even attention, is being paid to local search. It makes you wonder if newspapers are really serious about reaching out to the high volume of small businesses in their communities that have previously relied entirely on Yellow Pages.

The Seattle Times Co., however, is definitely an exception to the rule. Today, it launched “Network Search” across all its newspaper and vertical services, including Seattletimes.com, SeattlePI.com, NWsource.com, NWJobs.com, NWautos.com, NWapartments.com and NWHomes.com. The new search — which is not unlike the “Federated Search” solutions available from Harvest Info and Gannett’s Planet Discover – also incorporates some blogs and other sources.

Developed with FAST Search and Transfer (which is being purchased by Microsoft), Network Search bites the bullet with a single search box.

Many papers have been reluctant to go in that direction because the results would be too generalized. But the end result is that some papers have a dozen or more search boxes. And nobody ever thinks to look for anything on the site. They just go to Google.

One immediate advantage of The Times’ Network Search is that it opens up sponsored search advertising in a big way — something that has been largely hit or miss using third parties. In my limited testing, it works well.

A search for “Dungeness Crabs,” for instance, returns news stories on the harvest and restaurants where you can get them. It also has helpful sponsored search results for several excellent mail-order houses. A search for “Marqueen” has all the reviews and news to the nice boutique hotel in Queen Anne. And helpful sponsored searches for the competition.

A search for “Maria Cantwell,” on the other hand — the only senator I know since she used to do business development for Real Networks — returns her office’s latest news releases and news stories. And then also sponsored links for “Cantwell Hotels” and other things that probably have nothing to do with her. That’s probably the way it should work.

Seattle Times Interactive head Patricia Lee Smith says she believes the site has unmatched local content and “a uniquely local lens” that non-native search engines probably can’t hope to match in the foreseeable future. “This will also be the first of many advertising trials to connect local businesses with online readers via targeted search advertising,” she says.

Smith also promises that the search initiative is going to go deeper and deeper. The search box, for instance, will eventually be introduced on each of the Times Co.’s marketplace sites.

When a local team headed by ad agency and PR veteran Brian Tierney bought The Philadelphia Inquirer and related holdings 18 months ago, it was seen as a possible model for how “new thinking” could transform the newspaper industry.

Since then, Tierney and his team have had a tumultuous time, with major union problems, declining circulation and advertising shortfalls. But appearing at the Newspaper Association of America’s Marketing Conference in Orlando this week, Tierney laid out how he is righting the ship, bolstered in part by solid results from Philly.com, the online site headed by MediaNews Group veteran Eric Grilly.

Freed from corporate-wide deals made by Knight Ridder, Philly.com, which is “anything and everything Philly,” has been able to go its own way, signing with Monster.com for recruitment and building out community services. The site has doubled its page views and boosted unique visitors by 7 percent, says Tierney.

The goal is to attract new audiences online, and be realistic about print readership, which isn’t about young people. “We’re targeting women 35+,” says Tierney. “We’re being very, very tactical” with beach promotions, etc.

One of the biggest challenges faced by the company is that ads are bought by “32-year-old” account reps. “We know we’re a little bit uncool,” says Tierney. To counter such perceptions, Tierney is investing heavily in a media lab concept. “Agencies want to do TV,” he says. With broadband, Philly.com will counter that by creating TV shows, along with magazine-style stories and radio content.

For instance, the site has Philly Uncorked, a “wacky wine show” produced by the Philadelphia Wine School and sponsored by The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. Looking forward, Tierney sees real opportunities in e-commerce via Zeppy, an Amazon-like site that hopes to provide more of a local look and feel.

But first he needs his team to appreciate the economic challenges that lie ahead. “There will be economic literacy courses for everyone,” he says.

When veteran newspaper design consultant Alan Jacobsen called last year to tout his new classified video site, Real People Real Stuff – “the marriage of Craigslist and YouTube” — I thought it was kind of fun but didn’t have very good business prospects.

Video classifieds can’t be efficiently searched on a local or category basis; video production has been time consuming; video uploading has not been intuitive; and the value of most personal goods – the fodder for free ads – haven’t been high enough to make the effort. Real estate and cars, yes. Easy chairs that cost $10, probably not.

But Jacobsen (and his business partner, classified consultant Janet DeGeorge) have pressed on. To me, its prospects are still iffy. But it now has deals with 10 initial newspapers, including The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, The Provo Herald and The Spokesman Review in Spokane, Washington. Three more papers are coming online soon. The revenue comes from flat fees, based in print circulation. In the future, Google ads or the equivalent might be added.

More recently, the duo have added a vertical spin-off, Video Job Shop, which provides video resumes and a widget for Facebook. DeGeorge says the Job Shop is getting more attention from them than Real People Real Stuff since recruitment is very tangible and has higher priorities among potential newspaper clients.

Other video classified projects are also heating up. Jay Schauer, who runs Ad2Ad, a classified system for community papers and verticals, let me know that he’s just added
video for his national client base of community and college papers and verticals. Customers are demanding it, he says.

Creating a permanent video — typically a verbal response to someone’s cellphone video — is little more than clicking three buttons, adds Schauer, who spent two minutes making a sample video for me because he felt like it (and we are friends). “Sometimes I feel like such an old fart,” he goes on. “The youngsters these days use YouTube the way I use sticky notes. It’s a technology they find very simple and direct. Since YouTube has worked out phone video uploads, and direct uploads from your PC’s Webcam, the gap between creating and sharing a video has practically disappeared.”

Schauer sees video as the next step on an evolutionary path for classifieds that has included uploading pictures and providing enhanced online photo galleries. “These features have added a lot of extra revenue for the newspapers. I honestly don’t know where this technology is going, but now that I have incorporated it, I’m starting to think it’s an obvious and necessary next step,” he says.

A fourth classified video application comes from The North Ogden Standard Examiner in Utah. It has opened a Consignment Store, where a Webcam pans large items for sale in a physical location. Smaller items may be scanned. The items also appear in the newspaper. The store takes a 25 percent commission, and is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 till 2.

“Business has snowballed, with a 23 percent annual margin,” according to reporting from Newspaper Next’s Stephen Gray. “It is a natural extension of classifieds advertising.”

I just got off the phone with Pasadena, California-based Interpolls. The company has a number of rich media ad products and national brand ad clients, including HP, Scion and T-Mobile (full list here).

The company’s newest ad format is a widget-like product that brings polls into the mix. This places polls within banner ads to generate and qualify traffic for its advertisers. Though this polling data can be valuable for marketers, the functionality is used more to engage online shoppers.

Users are given the overall poll results after they vote on something related to a product (i.e., What is your cat’s favorite thing to do? A. eat B. sleep C. play). So it’s supposed to be a fun thing to do for users, who can see how their answer stacks up to overall results. This is also a way for advertisers to generate traffic and qualified leads of people who engaged with their ad.

More importantly, users are sometimes sent coupons or other calls to action. Voting on computing-based questions within an HP ad, for example, will target various product listings in a separate window that comes with a link to a Web site as well as “add to cart” functionality.

For lots of Interpolls’ target verticals, including consumer electronics, movie tickets and autos, there is a clear opportunity to combine this impression-based advertising with local directional advertising and to bring qualified users further down the purchase funnel. In the case of client Scion, this includes a dealer locater, according to Interpolls President Peter Kim, and there are many other possibilities.

Kim also points out that ad serving widgets across content networks is generally difficult because those widgets are seen as “fourth party” content that is generally not approved. This often requires partnering with an approved ad serving provider. Interpolls is already approved across a vast publisher network and is essentially integrating this polling functionality to its existing distributed client ads.

The company’s ads are also HTML-based unlike the majority of display ads, which are in flash. HTML, according to Kim, offers a lot more flexibility for switching poll questions and seasonal offers than flash does. The local implications will become clearer as Kim and company continue to develop the widget strategy and bring in more advertising clients in the verticals where products are mostly bought and sold offline.