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 years. The session “National Advertisers, Targeted Locally” looked at the ins and outs of working national angles and local targeting.

Steve Sherfy, Local and Mobile Search Manager, GroupM Search

Adam Epstein, President and CEO, adMarketplace

Pete Gombert, Founder and CEO, Balihoo

Karl Siebrecht, President and CEO, AdReady

The panelists represented ad networks and agencies involved with helping national brands purchase local online advertising, including display and pay per click. One of the challenges they face is balancing the national brand’s need for control over strategy and messaging with the affiliate’s unique local knowledge.

AdMarketplaces’ Adam Epstein used the upcoming presidential election to illustrated this challenge. A national campaign headquarters might not understand all the local keywords they should be buying to tap into what motivates voters. In New Jersey, the keyword “deleveling” (it involves a local schools issue) is critical, but only a local campaign operative would know that. The same could be said for a local branch of a national restaurant chain.

Ultimately, the panelists agreed that national to local only works in a top-down model, but the national brands need to find a way to leverage local knowledge.

Pete Gombert, founder and CEO of Ballihoo, learned the hard way that trying to go around the national brand to sell directly to local affiliates didn’t work. “We found that selling to local SMBs is really expensive, it’s hard to get them to engage, and you see high churn,” he said. “We discovered that if we focused on how to create a platform to allow national brands to set up rules for how programs are enabled at the local level, then just let the program run, that works well.”

Epstein described it this way, speaking specifically about the automotive sector, which he says does national to local particularly well: “Local has to buy in to what you are doing. Internet is about scale. There has to be decisionmakers looking at a lot of data. You can’t herd 6,000 cats and come up with a digital strategy.”

BIA/Kelsey Program Director Mike Boland ran yet another data packed and insightful mobile forum that attendees have come to love and expect at each BIA/Kelsey conference. With a power-packed lineup of speakers, Boland and the panelists covered the waterfront of topics including mobile ad targeting; mobile deals, payment and loyalty; and mobile product development.

Boland kicked off the panel noting BIA/Kelsey’s recently released 2011-2016 mobile local forecast in which mobile local searches will eclipse desktop local searches in 2016 with 113 billion searches. Meanwhile, mobile local ad revenues will hit $5 billion in that same year. What’s driving the mobile local growth? Boland reported three key reasons: increased usage; advertiser evolution; and premium ad rates that might be tied to Facebook sponsored stories, gaming and the like. Paths to how mobile local leaders will monetize local include campaign management, deals, landing pages, pay per call and paid search.

Speakers Walt Doyle, CEO of Where, and John Valentine, VP East Coast of SCVNGR/LevelUp, talked about their respective views on mobile payments. Doyle said referring to eBay’s acquisition of Where: “It’s been a big year. As a company, it’s been a six-year overnight success.”

Now a part of the PayPal unit of eBay, Where has more than 70 million users. Doyle noted about the acquisition that a key strength of Where was walking people into physical locations, but building a payment tool was a “mountain that we weren’t going to climb.” That led to a conversation with PayPal about how they could work together. Doyle reported that Where became the demand generation engine for PayPal to move payments into the physical world. This past year has been a process of building this technology out and now works with large retailers like Home Depot, Petco and Best Buy and small retailers alike.

Today, users can pay three different ways. For instance at Home Depot, users can continue to use a typical screen environment and identify themselves by typing in their phone number; they can use a Where/PayPal magnetic strip card; or they can tap and pay with their phone.

LevelUp also has a mobile payment technology that exists in nine U.S. cities including Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Atlanta where it was more than 100,000 users and 1,400 merchants participating. Right now, said John Valentine, VP – East Coast for SCVNGR/LevelUp, “everyone is trying to get in this space. It’s a land grab.”

Valentine said that LevelUp’s approach has been simple — create a loyalty program to get people to use it. Another key practice that LevelUp has used is feet on the street outside retail locations to talk to shoppers about using the system and offering them an incentive. What will the mobile payment ecosystem look like in the next couple of years? According to Valentine there will be some consolidation and five major platforms will remain.

Rounding out the mobile forum were Doug McDonald of goMobi and Darren Waddell of Reply. McDonald talked about goMobi’s (part of dotMobi) approach as a reseller of mobile websites. Waddell spoke of the new mobile application targeted at the home improvement category that Reply will be rolling out under the MerchantCircle brand. Adding on to the current merchant-focused app where merchants can control their Web presence, create deals, respond to reviews and other actions, new functionality will include a lead store with related functionality.

Geoff Cramer, CEO of SocialMadeSimple

Adam Japko, President of Digital Sherpa

Mark Schmulen, General Manager of Social Media for Constant Contact

Neil Kataria, President of newBrandAnalytics

Catherine Tucker, Associate Professor of Marketing for MIT Sloan School of Management

Social Local Media Program Director Jed Williams kicked off the SuperForum with BIA/Kelsey data that show 40 percent of SMBs have a Facebook page for brand awareness purposes. However, the industry is in the midst of a paradigm shift from SMB social management and presence to targeted, interesting content for users to read and share. Our first three panelists represent companies with three different approaches to social content curation for local merchants: outsourcing, automated and do-it-yourself (DIY).

When it comes to social content solutions for SMBs, Digital Sherpa’s Adam Japko said, “We are platform and strategy agnostic.” His rationale is that tools and platforms are constantly shifting in the evolving social media landscape. What Digital Sherpa focuses on is helping SMBs get better search engine optimization through content on blogs. “Blogging is powerful,” Japko said. “People find content on the Web and blogs are a great way to promote that content.” Japko sees social media as a tool to leverage blog content. “At the heart of social media marketing are the content creators,” he said.

SocialMadeSimple takes a different approach. Its white-label platform helps SMBs manage their social presence with industry specific analytic guidance and curated content. SocialMadeSimple’s content library offers industry-specific content selected by editors in the form of pre-formatted links, articles and news stories along with RSS feeds. Subscribers can click a button to broadcast to one or all of their social media networks and blog. Its media partners can also add their content to the library. “With our platform, we tell [SMBs] what they need to do,” said CEO Geoff Cramer. “We believe that curating and sharing interesting content is a part of an [SMBs] brand voice.”

“Social media is going to kill email.” Constant Contact General Manager Mark Schmulen didn’t believe that when he first heard it a few years ago and he doesn’t now. However, Constant Contact has evolved from a primarily email marketing focus to social campaigns. As a DIY marketing services company, Constant Contact is able to serve SMBs content needs and, according to Schmulen, keep costs low. Schmulen sees social media and email marketing as complementary. “Both are forms of permission marketing,” Schmulen said. But he doesn’t see social media as the holy grail of content curation. “Starting a conversation inside email is the best way to start social media engagement,” Schmulen said, citing an email open rate of more than 20 percent.

In what other ways are SMBs measuring the success of their marketing campaigns? SMBs need actionable results. Some SMBs just look at Facebook fan numbers to gauge their audience reach. But quality is more important than quantity. SMBs want reliable, consistent people to comment and share the content on their Facebook and Twitter pages. “At its core, social media marketing is about word of mouth,” Schmulen said.

MIT’s Catherine Tucker echoed a similar sentiment during her presentation on Facebook ads. Her data showed that 75 percent of increased effectiveness of ads on social networks came from social targeting rather than social endorsements. The current issue with Facebook ads is that it assumes all friends on a consumer’s Facebook page are equal, therefore any friend’s endorsement of a product is enough to create additional shares and conversion. But most users are predisposed to pay more attention to the brands that their close friends interact with.

Local merchants can benefit from segmented data about existing and potential customers. That’s what D.C.-based newBrandAnalytics believes. Its technology allows them to measure social media customer feedback on a store-by-store basis. We’ll continue to examine how social business intelligence can empower local merchants to improve their operations by helping them better understand their individual customers. Here’s a visual example from President Neil Kataria on how it works:

Today at BIA/Kelsey’s ILM East conference, outgoing Citygrid Media CEO Jay Herratti gave a retrospective view of the past five years of local media — what has worked and what hasn’t. He also didn’t miss the opportunity to make some predictions of what will drive the next big winners.

Herratti reminded us of a few classic local challenges such as scaling advertiser aquisition in the face of fragmentation. This is shown by the fact that no one has definitively “won” local, despite lots of activity and product introductions in the last decade.

“In local, every two people have three opinions on everything, such as what will win in mobile payments,” he said. “We are still arguing about what is working and not working because we still don’t know. It’s still a work in process.”

31 Flavors of Local

The subsectors of local grappling with these common challenges include deals, lead generation, local search, local listings, geo-social, local verticals, transactions, Web hosting & presence, reputation management, etc.

There are leaders in some of these subsectors such as Yelp in the “places” space, and Google in local search (via scale). We also see emerging players like Yext in presence management (Maybe the answer lies in the “Y” initial).

One of these subsectors where CityGrid now hangs its hat is location based ad placement. This is the local ad network space — which also include players like AT&T interactive — aiming to be the “AdSense of Local.” It has one-stop shop appeal and aggregation of fragmented ad inventory.

“The only way to acheive scale in local is by aggregation,” said Herratti, in support of the company’s pivot two years ago toward this local ad network model.

Pinned Down

Going beyond these main subcategories, Herratti outlined his view of the next emerging trends that will drive innovation accross the local space, and get us closer to categorical solutions of these traditional local media challenges.

1. “Big Data”: (Factual, Localeze, Infogroup, CityGrid)

2. Loyalty: (Punchcard, Shopkick, Stampt, Punchd)

3. Proximity Marketing: (Thinknear, Where, GrouponNow, Placecast)

4. Mobile Payments: (Square, Google Wallet, PayPal, credit card companies)

5. Peer-to-Peer: (Taskrabbit, Zaarly, Airbnb, Getaround)

6. Pinterest

The last one is interesting not just because of Pinterest’s insane usage growth, but because it’s still an open book when it comes to local applications. Herratti points out that Facebook wasn’t much of a local play at first (besides being geographically oriented around college campuses), but look at it now.

“Anytime something attracts users so quickly, it will end up being local,” he said. “I bet there is a company right now in New York or San Francisco pitching the ‘Pinterest of local,’ using interface or principles that Pinterest has put together.”

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 18 years of experience in advertising sales, including 12 years in radio.

“We are a one-stop shop,” Slater said of Katz 360. The digital arm of Katz Media Group, Katz 360 aggregates its digital offerings. For example, it offered a Super Tuesday package for clients in relevant states with a combo of pre-roll video, display ads and email marketing they could send to Democrats, Republicans or Independents. Katz 360 clients include national television and radio broadcasters. “Most broadcasters today know they need a robust and mature digital offering not just for advertisers but for audiences as well,” Slater said. “Digital integration lets them drive traffic from on-air to the Web.”

Agencies and political action committees (PACs) are also more focused on audience targeting rather than site-specific targeting, Slater said. Audience targeting includes capturing a cookie of someone from his or her computer on a website and aligning that with offline data such as household income, place of residence, etc. PACs can further match that data with voting records and deliver a targeted message accordingly. “Online lets them have multiple strategies,” Slater said. He’s seen ad budgets break down spend with one-third in search and targeted display. The rest is used for email marketing, online video and audio.

Although we’ve seen early numbers from the presidential election primaries, the ad spend of local political candidates is less forthcoming. “We are waiting for it to kick in,” Slater said. “Everything else has to vet out until we get closer to the elections.”

The New York Times and other news organizations have been hampered by the short cuts of HTML and hyperlinks, but are now reclassifying to provide more structured, fluid data in a major development with massive implications, noted New York Times VP of Research Operations Michael Zimbalist, who keynoted Day 2 at ILM East. The benefits are immediate in terms of SEO, but longer term, provider richer product for consumers, said Zimbalist.

“Information has become increasingly granular or structured,” he said. “Each unit of content has extensive machine readable metadata about itself.” Fluid information can move more easily among machines and people.

In the case of The New York Times, it can now process the 300 pieces of professional content it produces every day — a brick of compiled information — into multiple formats, including things such as personal editions and slide shows. “You are reaching underneath the databases the power the Web to do new things,” said Zimbalist.

The key is to move the surplus of names to strong identifiers that are linking to data cloud driven by meta data. The Times, for instance, is embarking on moving all its data to DBpedia, which drives Wikipedia, Freebase, which is owned by Google, and GeoNames. To date, 29,000 names have been recontextualized for a new semantic platform — a “super librarian” — which includes 39 percent of people (“Edgar Allen Poe”), 31 percent of organizations, 76 percent of locations (“Park Slope”) and 14 percent of descriptions. “The future is bright for librarians,” joked Zimbalist.

Long before daily deals surged, and now after they’ve peaked and pivoted, loyalty and rewards programs stand as beachheads in the evolving online promotions/commerce ecosystem. At ILM East 2012, three leaders in loyalty discussed how advertising and commerce are quickly colliding, and how “big data” is shaping the new merchant/consumer relationship.

Next Jump CEO Charlie Kim suggested that advertising and commerce have been on a collision course for decades, with the paradigm shifting from acquiring new customers to acquiring new, loyal customers. Data he shared — loyal customers are worth 24 times more than new customers just acquired — supports his theory. Next Jump, which runs 90,000 B2B merchant-funded loyalty programs, is placing its bet on points systems that reinforce status and avoid privacy breaches.

Cartera Executive VP Jim Douglass is a believer in cultivating customer loyalty through hyper-relevant merchant offers that are card-linked to existing bank cards and tie into popular loyalty programs (airline miles, for instance) to motivate purchase. The company uses multiple sources of data to surface targeted deals that the merchant subsidizes only when consumers actually buy. Activity around the brand is then buttressed with deep analytics. “The payments and cards space is turning into an advertising business,” Douglass said.

Bundle is approaching the merchant loyalty space from a user perspective first, operating a consumer-facing site that analyzes credit card data to “rate merchants across several dimensions.” CEO Jaidev Shergill asserted that this enables unbiased views of restaurants that cut through the proverbial clutter of reviews sites such as Yelp. “You’re rating with your wallet.” Behavioral profiles are built, and lists created, that suggest other types of people who frequent specific restaurants, and where else they may go.

Whether it’s card-linked offers, purchase profiles, or points-driven perks, capturing, synthesizing and building actionable insights around data are the centerpieces of marrying loyalty and commerce, the next frontiers of both advertising and deals.

Two leading digital executives from the Boston Globe shared some of the innovative ways the newspaper is using social media to connect with Boston consumers and extend the newspaper’s relevance in the community.

Lisa DeSisto, chief advertising officer/GM of Boston.com, described how the Globe has divided is online product approach between the established Boston.com, one of the earliest successful city guides, and the new BostonGlobe.com, which is focused on premium (read paid) content. Unlimited digital access is $14.95 per month. For $14, you get digital plus the Sunday print edition. This provides some incentive to take the Sunday paper, which still carries a mother lode of ads. The new online edition was launched last fall and now has about 16,000 subscribers.

DeSisto said the decisions 16 years ago to avoid the Globe brand with Boston.com turned out to be a particularly good one, since it enabled it to come to market with two distinct online products.

Jeff Moriarty, VP, digital products, Boston Globe, described how the Globe’s Media Lab serves as an “ecosystem for innovation” for the newspaper. To bolster the spirit of innovation, the newspapers lends out space in the lab to start ups, roughly eight companies are operating there now. “The more smart people in the room, the better,” Moriarty says.

Twitter is key to how the Globe uses social media.

“Twitter has gone through the roof,” Moriarty said. “Our newsroom is truly real time. A story starts as a tweet, goes to a blog post and ends up in print.”

Some of the new social products that the Globe is experimenting with include a new service that Moriarty describes as a Twitter for events. Another service called Pulse does sentiment analysis around all the chatter what is flowing through Twitter or Facebook about everything Boston, included all of its rabidly followed sports teams.