Today at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local conference, Hill Holiday EVP and Chief Media Officer Cindy Stockwell gave a street-level view of the opportunities and challenges confronting brands as they seek to localize their advertising/marketing. While there are voluminous channel and platform choices, Stockwell stressed three universal precepts: “add value to consumers in whatever channel they …

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 …

BIA/Kelsey forecasts digital advertising/marketing to grow to about 25 percent of the local ad spending pie next year. This growth puts companies on the hook to develop integrated marketing strategies that connect the entire purchase funnel to drive revenue, a very difficult task.
On Wednesday, Nov. 14th, BIA/Kelsey and Balihoo held a Webinar on this very …

Vocus, a cloud marketing and public relations software provider, is focused on helping SMBs grow their online business with its new marketing dashboard. Business Development Manager Christine Mulquin shared with us that the company is targeting its marketing suite to the subsidiaries of its larger clients. It’s a practical strategy as we continue to see …

Here’s what we’ve been waiting to announce: Google Offers’ head Nitin Mangtani will join our great list of keynoters at ILM East March 26-28 in Boston. We believe Mangtani’s appearance marks one of the first public debuts of Google Offers, which is playing a major role in Google’s vital local strategy, along with Google Places, …

Watching free videos on the Web is convenient and entertaining. But most viewers won’t say the same about pre-roll video ads. Enter Solve Media. The ad tech company announced the launch of Pre-Roll Insurance today. The new technology prompts viewers to enter a brand’s tag line or message to skip a pre-roll video ad. If …

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 …

Last week I attended Opus Research’s Conversational Commerce Conference (a.k.a. “C3). The focus of the discussion was mostly on social media and its impact on marketing and customer care, at both the local and national brand levels. While there is a lot of interesting activity using social media for customer acquisition, the biggest surprise for …

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 …

Content remains king on the Internet mainly because there are more ways to produce, connect and interact with content than ever before. According to Rod Smith of IBM, “there are more ways to dig into content than ever before, but it also produces more targeted ways for advertisers to interact with the audiences they are …

We keep saying that media darlings like Foursquare and Gowalla will have to evolve beyond the game mechanics and check-ins that have driven their usage. Simply put, these drivers will lose novelty.
Among other things, they’ll need to develop an exchange of monetary value or utility. Foursquare knows this and has been vocal about it. Meanwhile, I’ve …

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 …

We had the opportunity to meet with Medialets CEO Eric Litman to understand its unique approach to deploying media rich mobile advertising. Medialets started out as a mobile ad network much like Feedburner but quickly realized that what mobile advertising lacked was a platform that facilitated the placement of media rich mobile ads in publisher …

Score one for local businesses … at least in Minnesota.
As of Aug. 1, the state began enforcement of a law that prohibits advertising “deceptive local telephone numbers and geographically deceptive business names” across the Internet, as well as in print advertisements and directories.
Legislation targets national businesses that camouflage themselves behind local names and listings, cluttering …

One of the recommendations we have been supporting and talking about over the past year is the need to look at the print directory differently. For the past 100-plus years, the directory has been viewed as a distribution media vehicle — “we deliver to every resident in a city.” In recent years, with distribution declining …

Local/social leaders from Facebook, Yelp and Twitter took the stage at IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in Carlsbad, California, this week to discuss what IAB President Randall Rothenberg called “the mobile/social local real-time medium that does not have a name.”
Facebook’s Tim Kendall, director of monetization, said Facebook has essentially introduced “marketing on the social graph” by …

Serial Web entrepreneur Mark H. Goldstein  has been the founder of such sites as Kmart’s BlueLight and Impulse Buy. More recently, he invested in green ecology-based ventures, but he grew bored and came back to ecommerce with Loyalty Lab and  Home-Account.com, which matched homeowners with mortgage brokers, competing with the likes of LendingTree , Bankrate.com …

While retailers are reducing their brand advertising, along with store inventory and head count at their headquarters and stores, promotions, local events and direct marketing efforts are getting a big boost, says TNS Retail Forward Executive VP Dan Stenik, who was speaking at the NAA Annual Convention in San Diego.
Quoting an ancient Chinese proverb, Stenik …

Longtime U.S. independent publisher White Directory (owned by Hearst Corp.) has launched a complete rebranding, dropping the old “Talking Phone Book” in favor of “LocalEdge.” The company says it plans to phase in the new brand over the next 12 months.
In our view, the rebranding is way overdue. “Talking Phone Book” is a brand that …

The phone is quickly advancing as a means of pushing out ad-sponsored content that mimics some of the popular mobile advertising features.
Greg Webster of VoodooVox, at ILM:08, debuted some of the new features of the company’s In-Call Media group, demonstrating additional marketing opportunities via on-hold messages, “pre-call” messages when using calling cards, and distribution over …