When it comes to Local Yokel Media’s business focus, it’s all about 15 miles. That’s because 80 percent of consumer spending is done within 15 miles of home. CEO and Founder Dick O’Hare shared that fact at this afternoon’s session on “Local Targeting: Getting the Bull’s Eye.” O’Hare added that geo-contextual relevance is the key to optimal ad performance. “With the right targeting on display, the traditional marketing funnel can collapse and go from awareness to purchase in one step,” O’Hare said.

Co-Panelist Jeff Minich, senior product marketing manager for Yahoo, agreed. But he also zoomed in on the importance of addressability by targeting the right users and measuring the full impact of every impression. “It’s all about finding the optimal radius around brick and mortar locations for achieving offline performance objectives.”

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 segmentation and message targeting.

The company has released the latest iteration of its digital display ad platform — AdReady Version 3 — which has been upgraded to allow agencies and advertisers to create multiple campaigns more simply and then automate targeting controls of these campaigns across all media sites. It also makes media placement and bidding recommendations.

Siebrecht told BIA/Kelsey that AdReady specializes in serving mid-market companies because “huge digital agencies have difficulty profitably serving smaller clients.” It is yet to significantly tap the SMB segment, which has proven difficult to achieve scale in. 

For “vastly underserved” mid-sized businesses, ad versioning is crucial to position specific messages and offers to their demographic, behavioral and geographic needs. Siebrecht cited regional travel companies (Alaska Airlines) and colleges with multiple graduate program as ideal candidates to take advantage of AdReady’s re-messaging and re-targeting capabilities.

AdReady white labels its platform to several high-visibility publishers to incorporate in their display offerings, including The New York Times, ESPN and Pandora. Agencies and advertisers can run campaigns themselves or have AdReady “provide a layer of service on top to assist.” Again, SMB prospecting is limited, though Yahoo uses the service to drive its self-serve display program, My Display Ads, geared toward smaller businesses.

For those SMBs that have the understanding and fiscal capability to self-serve, there are immediate benefits. Campaign costs are significantly lower (starting as low as $300 per month) than typical pricing barriers, and businesses can choose from among 800 display templates for more sophisticated creative. 

AdReady is banking on a display renaissance, competing with PaperG and Mixpo to provide localized solutions to agencies. While display ad revenues sagged by more than 5 percent last year, many projections for 2010 and beyond suggest a rebound.

Zillow, after five years and $87 million raised, says it is now in the black for the first time, after focusing more on revenues. It also announced that Spencer Rascoff has been appointed CEO, replacing  Expedia Founder Rich Barton, who becomes executive chairman and focuses on a heavy portfolio of vertical investments, such as Avvo.com, the legal site.

Rascoff and Barton, in a phone call yesterday, told us that the company is currently driving revenues on Zillow.com, Yahoo Real Estate and Mobile from five key revenue streams, including its Mortgage Marketplace, display, national advertising, local advertising and mobile advertising. The latter channel has become especially critical and now accounts for 20 percent of usage on weekends, says Barton.

“Real estate is the ultimate local shopping experience,” suggests Rascoff.

The mortgage marketplace, especially, has become one of the company’s fastest growing areas as well, with 314,000 mortgage leads being processed on the site, up six fold from August 2009 , when it was introduced. This compares in the balance to 4 million homes being listed, and 150,000 rental listings.

Twenty-five percent of home shoppers are now looking at home rentals as a point of comparison, says Rascoff.

In a discussion with paidContent, Patch President Warren Webster discussed Patch’s check list of 59 variables that the site uses to determine which new towns it enters, including a first cut that consists of town population between 15,000 and 75,000; having better than average school scores; and better than average household incomes and voting penetration. A second cut includes qualitative characteristics such as civic “walkability” and the presence of an active business community.

While the site hasn’t focused on revenues to date, Webster told paidContent that it has had some experimental advertising, including banners ads and business listings that can be upgraded into advertising. It also has had some geotargeted national advertising for campaigns such as Pepsi Refresh. The site also plans to syndicate the data it is collecting on local communities to marketers.

There has, of course, been a blind assumption that if AOL is investing, then hyperlocal is finally ready for prime time. It is too early to come to that conclusion — witness The New York Times’ pullback a few weeks back from The Local, its aborted hyperlocal effort.

But AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s consistent and vocal support for Patch, which he founded in 2007 as a side project when he was at Google, is definitely seen as validation for multimillion-dollar investments by others. These include other news-centric town site nets such as Main Street Connect; content creator sites such as Examiner.com; and city sites that break out neighborhood info via ZIP codes such as Allbritton’s TBD.com in Washington, D.C., Citysquares and various newspaper efforts.

Hyperlocal commerce sites such as MerchantCircle, DataSphere, Matchbin and ShopCity should also be seen as part of the mix. So should sites that have hired human writers to supplement local news feeds, such as HelloMetro and Yahoo Local. Event sites such as Zvents and Eventful are also part of the mix, as are sites that have a lot of events and local in them, such as Center’d and AmericanTowns.

City guides that are more metro-oriented, such as Citysearch and Yelp, should also be part of the mix, as should social directory sites such as YP.com, Local.com and MojoPages.

So, what’s the prognosis? We certainly like what we see at Patch. The town sites are attractive; they invite interaction and have a good “human” feel — some more than others, often based on how long the town site has been open. The longer, the better.

The aggregation of events is good and so is their mapping. There is also some intriguing video that draws people in. I especially enjoyed the contentious town meeting in my hometown of Chappaqua, N.Y. A lot of the infrastructure is more economically produced by central resources.

But in truth, Patch’s success or failure won’t ride so much on content and feature differentiation. Fifty million dollars is a lot of money. But it represents the scope of the project, not the individual sites. You wouldn’t go to a Patch community such as Westport, Connecticut, and say it stands head and shoulders above other local alternatives, such as Hearst’s Westport News, Main Street Connect’s The Daily Westport or Westport Now. Patch’s young and enthusiastic reporters are sometimes better (or not better) than their young and enthusiastic reporters.

What Patch’s ultimate success really rides on is changing local user behavior so that people feel compelled to check out the local patch at least a couple of times a week. It has to be a bigger swath than the older home owners who make up the primary audience of community weeklies — it’s got to be everybody. And then they’ve got to sell SMBs from the directory level on up — much of the effort probably riding on self-serve. And then they’ve got to get the geotargeted national advertising going.

Patch hopes to get over the hump by having enough of a footprint in its communities to begin marketing in a major way, perhaps, I speculate, on TV and radio and online. For sure, it is an exciting effort, and no one should dismiss it out of hand. In fact, AOL is spending the money and making the effort that could, in theory, save local journalism and hyperlocal commerce for everyone.

Gannett’s local newspapers and TV stations will begin selling Yahoo inventory, considerably boosting the size of Yahoo’s local sales efforts. The deal, which involves 81 newspaper organizations and seven of its 23 TV stations, is similar to the efforts of Yahoo’s 800-member Newspaper Consortium.

But Gannett, notably, is staying separate from the Consortium. In part, Gannett was concerned that contract was newspaper specific (even though Media General and Freedom Interactive, which both have added TV stations, seem to work within it). The timing for originally joining the Consortium also wasn’t good, as Gannett was still backing CareerBuilder while the consortium was launched with Yahoo Hot Jobs.

Yahoo VP of Channel Sales Lem Lloyd has been working on projects with Gannett for more than a decade, starting when he was an executive at Knight Ridder and they co-owned verticals ranging from CareerBuilder to Cars.com. “When the corporate entity puts a focus on something, they have a great ability to have local properties execute strong sales and execution,” he says.

Lloyd adds that both entities are committing major resources to the new effort. “Gannett is in an especially strong position to help due to its portfolio of smaller media markets, which typically fall from DMAs 75-200,” says Lloyd. “It is a great proving ground for selling more sophisticated advertising to local businesses.”

What isn’t involved is Gannett Local, a separate venture designed to sell search solutions to SMBs. Tribune also recently launched a local search arm. Lloyd notes that the Yahoo deal won’t be at all search oriented.

Yahoo is seeking to extend direct marketing budgets online via a new deal with DM giant Valassis, which claims 15,000 advertisers and reaches 114 million shoppers. The new effort adds another dimension to Yahoo’s local reachout, which currently focuses on newspapers and Yellow Pages. The Valassis relationship has the potential to bring its broadcaster and telco marketing affiliates into Yahoo’s fold as well.

The new deal marks an evolution of the local strategy, which seeks to be all embracing in efforts to win a higher percentage of local budgets for online, while also focusing on specific verticals, such as fast food.

In other local Yahoo news, paidContent reports that Yahoo has dropped some underperformers from its Newspaper Consortium. Yahoo told the newsletter that fewer than a dozen of its 800-plus newspaper members were involved.

Monster Worldwide has bought HotJobs from Yahoo for $225 million. It will also be in charge of Yahoo’s recruitment content in North America for the next three years, bringing in perhaps another $100 million for the life of the deal from home page traffic, etc. As part of the deal, which closes in 3Q 2010, Monster also gets exclusive rights to negotiate similar arrangements with Yahoo’s overseas properties.

HotJobs has been on the market since Carol Bartz took over as CEO of Yahoo early last year (or even before). It hasn’t been clear if anyone would buy it for more than a fire-sale price. The deal’s price of $225 million does represent a significant discount from the $439 million that Yahoo paid in 2002, but it is more than some handicappers had been predicting.

The deal likely propels Monster well past Gannett’s CareerBuilder as the online recruitment leaders (by revenues). Lately, CareerBuilder’s lagging profits have become a drain on Gannett’s profits. Likewise, Monster today reported that 4Q revs were down 27 percent, and that it suffered a net loss of $2.1 million on 4Q revenues of $213 million.

For Yahoo, the deal is the latest in a series of selloffs. Notably, it sold its search business to Microsoft last year, has de-emphasized other areas such as shopping and small business, and has been rumored to put some of its other verticals in play as well.

HotJobs, of course, had been the original glue that brought Yahoo and the newspapers together. But the consortium has lately been focused more on using Yahoo’s APT behavioral targeting advertising platform. Some members of the consortium already use Monster.

Recruitment remains a huge category, but in recent years, has been challenged by the recession. It has also become a major battle zone driven by technologies, such as semantic search-and-match job listings, mapping and communities of interest. Indeed, a growing part of the market has moved to niche specialties, such as trade associations, etc. At the same time, ancillary verticals such as vocational education, relocation and job fairs have proved to be less important than once thought.

Allmenus.com, the online ordering portal with 255,000 restaurant menus around the country and 3,500 online ordering relationships, will focus on specific local markets via a new partnership program that gives a portion of revenues to newspapers or other local promotional partners.

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette is live, and other newspapers and local media companies are anticipated as partners in coming months. Allmenus.com is the second brand from parent company Dotmenu.com. The original brand was Campusfood.com, which brings online ordering to college students.

Allmenus’ media partnerships involve co-branding and promotional advertising, potentially including display, direct, e-mail and social media. They also involve contextual integrated content. While they notably don’t involve the papers in sales, the papers receive a minority share of local market revenues. Revenues are derived from online food ordering, advertising and monthly maintenance fees.

Allmenus Chief Revenue Officer Tony Wills, a former exec with Quigo, Newsday and R.H. Donnelley, says the company determined that local markets had to be launched one at a time to be truly successful — even though it has good distribution via Google and Yahoo Local. Newspapers still have the online brand and promotional power to best drive local awareness and sales, he says, despite their drop-offs in penetration and usage. Newspapers also appreciate Allmenus as a “content” service since it strives to have the most comprehensive set of menus in each market — something it handles with local feet on the street, and fly-in teams.

Under terms of the partnerships, Allmenus widgets for online ordering will be featured in specific contextual parts of newspaper sites, including sports, local, weather and business. While it would seem to make sense to have newspapers also handle local sales, Wills says that it wouldn’t really work because newspaper sales staffs are paid on commissions.

A primary reason it wouldn’t work is that Allmenus takes no money upfront. Instead, it charges a transaction fee that is a little over 10 percent.  It takes 11.5 percent, or $5.75, out of a $50 order, for instance. “If there is no revenue, there is no sale,” says Wills.

In any case, newspapers may have trouble committing the resources in today’s environment. “Newspapers are under siege,” says Wills. “They can’t commit the resources. They need it to be turn-key.”

There is a role for newspaper sales reps, however — to build awareness for the Allmenus service. “It makes the print sale” for restaurants more valuable because of added awareness and usage, says Wills. Indeed, online ordering is a big piece of the restaurant landscape. Pizza Hut is getting 30 percent of its sales online. Moreover, online boosts the amount of sales — online orders are 10 percent higher than in-person orders because it is so easy to check off additional or more expensive items. Ultimately, however, it is a different ballgame than brand and awareness advertising.

Under the new leadership of CEO Carol Bartz, everything is up for review at Yahoo, and that probably includes HotJobs, its recruitment site. But recent press reports suggesting that HotJobs has already been designated for sale are off base.

The news stories are based on Bartz’s broad answer to a question about which Yahoo properties might be vulnerable. HotJobs has never been singled out.

The future of HotJobs is an especially important issue to many members of the 800-newspaper strong Yahoo consortium, which was initially put together to co-promote HotJobs as a national recruitment solution. HotJobs remains an important part of the consortium’s efforts, although some members of the consortium use other recruitment  solutions, such as Monster.com. There has been a lot of focus on behavioral targeting (SmartAds), as well as conversion and take rates.

Bartz herself has already made several gestures in support of the consortium. Last month, she appeared at the consortium’s affiliate meeting in Las Vegas.

Next week is the Newspaper Association of America’s Annual Convention in San Diego. I’ll cover Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote on Tuesday, in which he’ll express his support of the newspaper industry despite Google’s very public axing in January of its Print Ads newspaper partnership (the talk is being streamed live at 10 a.m. PDT).

Newspapers, of course, aren’t in very good shape right now. Long term, their traditional model may not be sustainable. But if you are trying to reach the local audience, they deliver an effective yield, with local readership of maybe 25 percent to 30 percent. You can’t match it.

Yahoo is relying on its ambitious newspaper consortium to help in a number of ways. Among other things, its newspaper ties supports HotJobs, provides inventory for national advertising and sells behavioral targeting.

Zillow is another partner that is banking (somewhat) on its ties with newspapers.The Zestimates company expects a healthy bump from this week’s launch of a real estate search partnership with 180 newspapers, including The Tampa Tribune and 100 small weeklies owned by Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. among its first rollouts.

In coming months, additional papers will launch, including the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Winston-Salem Journal. Besides search, Zillow is providing real estate advice features and mortgage information and calculators.

CFO Spencer Rascoff says he especially likes the strong newspaper brand. The Tampa Tribune has “close to 100 percent brand ID in its locality” he says — something that a new brand like Zillow wouldn’t have on its own.

Going into the annual conference, I’m not very interested in hearing about the various life-support efforts that newspapers have had to undertake (but there will be a lot of that). In my backyard, the L.A. Times has shown the way by ending the poly-bagging of the morning newspaper so that my sprinklers destroy the paper, wrapping each section with an overlapping ad that needs to be peeled off before I can read it, enclosing AARP membership materials since I am probably ready for it (not) and making me specifically ask for credit when I suspend the paper for vacation holds.

In my hometown of San Diego, I find it especially depressing that the local paper (which has just been sold to an equity firm at a fire sale price) is perhaps most identified with the homeless men selling it at red lights.

But I’m always very interested in hearing about what newspapers can do as a powerhouse local brand with daily frequency that delivers to a large percentage of the community in print, online and now on mobile. The footprint won’t be as large, the news coverage won’t be as extensive, and substitutes may develop equal effectiveness. But the opportunities beckon.

In fact, as we see at conference after conference, newspapers have more experiments going on in local community, information and commerce than any other sector in our interactive local media space. It isn’t entirely because of any special nostalgia that I keep an eye on this industry.