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 …

In BIA/Kelsey’s Feb 21st webinar, National Marketers Refining Localization Strategies – A ‘Leading in Local’ Conversation, (available on-demand), the discussion focused on how national brands are increasing their efforts in marketing their products on a local level. Balihoo’s Marketing Director, Susan Tormollen, along with Jed Williams, BIA/Kelsey Senior Analyst, analyzed key findings from a new …

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 …

The biggest boom in local is actually national. With geotargeting options, better metrics and better creative national brands and agencies are increasingly going the local route. GroupM research shows that 83 percent of brand advertisers expect their local online spending to be more than their overall projected online growth (25 percent) over the next three …

Eight billion dollars. That’s the total estimate of political advertising spend this year given by Andy Slater, vice president of digital agency sales at Katz 360, during our morning session of day 2 at ILM East. Of $8 billion, Slater predicts that online ad spend will be between 3 percent and 5 percent. Slater has …

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 …