ReachLocal announced Wednesday that it entered a strategic alliance with SureFire Search, a New Zealand marketing agency that works with small and medium-sized businesses. The move will expand ReachLocal's global presence, which includes online ad campaigns in the United Kingdom,…
A BIA/Kelsey case study will publish soon for subscribers about the much-vaunted, much rebuked launch of Color. I've been traveling and avoiding the discussion until I got to actually use the app. For those unfamiliar, Color is a location-based photo…
The San Diego Union-Tribune is buying DiscoverSD. com, a lifestyle website founded in 2006. The acquisition, in the works for six months, was made with an eye toward expanding the UT’s fast growing Daily Deal business arm, which is expected…
After examining the totals for 2010 radio station sales, one could become depressed. Like 2009, the total amount spent on acquisitions hovered around $400 million, even with 2010 considered to be a year of some economic recovery. However, the final…
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…
At first I thought this has to be an April Fools' joke. But hitting my inbox today, the date seems to be off. So as far as I can tell, it's real. Mobile Ad network Adzookie is offering to basically…
This is the first in a series of interviews we will be doing with executives focused on Social Local Media
While much has been made of how social media is changing consumer behavior, advertisers are struggling to keep up with and make sense of this shiny new toy. Matthew Goldman is the executive director of product management for subscription ad products at ATT Interactive (parent of YellowPages.com). Goldman is ATTi’s point man on social strategies for its advertisers.
What Products Are You Responsible For?
I am responsible for Consumer & Advertiser Products including IYP products, YP 360, websites, mobile websites and social media products.
How Does ATTi Think About Social Media Regarding Its Advertisers?
Social needs to be interwoven into everything. Three years ago there was hardly any focus on social within the organization, and perhaps in the industry. Now it’s everywhere and we’ve bought into that.
We are providing the basics. For example, when we build a website for an advertiser it will have FB like button and Twitter feeds. If you add video there are video sharing tools and virtual tours. In addition you can add a Facebook Fan page to your site.
What Are You Doing for Reputation Monitoring?
In August 2010 we rolled out our Online Presence Manager, which allows a business to review its reviews from a variety of review sites. We are private labeling Marchex’s platform and integrating it with ATT’s single sign-on. Any ATT customer who buys any ad product, including a bold listing in the book, is provided with ability to sign up for a free/lite version. The lite version limits the number of trends you can track and provides a monthly email summary of activity. For businesses that don’t get a lot of reviews, this is a good way to start. The paid version is about $30/month and includes unlimited history and alerts and competitor comparison view, so you can see how the guy across the street is doing. We are seeing pretty strong take rates and now have over 10,000 customers, many of which are paid.
ATTi’s Online Presence Manager Reviews Dashboard
Since iAd arrived last year with much fanfare, there have been surprisingly low incidents of actually spotting the ads within iPhone apps. This has provided some evidence to support reports that Apple is having trouble selling them beyond marquee brands.
Apple today released an app (an appropriate vehicle) that showcases all iAd campaigns in one place. This might seem strange: an app just for ads … who would want to just view ads? It’s a good question but it almost fetishizes iAd while also providing a good research tool.
The latter could apply to brands that want to see what is possible with iAd. For reporters or analysts, it’s a good tool to finally find and view iAd campaigns on demand. They’re all in one place in a gallery format. The app is in fact called iAd Gallery and can be downloaded free here.
My first reaction is that the ads are very robust, and offer a lot beyond pushing products. There are often games, videos and other interactive features that utilize the touch screen, GPS and other hardware specs. This isn’t new — something we’ve covered — but it’s good to see it in action.
I’d recommend checking out the app and playing with some of the ads. This goes especially for publishers or advertisers wondering how iAd applies to you and the cool things you can do with it. I get questions like this all the time so I know you’re out there.
In the meantime, see below for a series of screenshots I took of one of the campaigns on display within the app: A BMW campaign with interactive tours of the X3, videos and a dealer locator. It’s all pretty slick, as expected.
Groupon gets much of the credit for "making coupons cool again." But it's the smartphone, with its inherent social, geo and touch capabilities, that may make them cooler than ever. By "cooler," we mean discoverable and relevant. The St. Petersburg…
Localeze announced today an agreement with ReachLocal to extend its business listings identity management solution to ReachLocal's Web presence platform, ReachCast. Within ReachCast's data syndication network, Localize will provide ReachCast customers with improved online business listings visibility through relationships with…
Last fall, BIA/Kelsey introduced Solve Media, a company that uses CAPTCHAs as a new marketing vehicle for brand advertisers, while also creating new revenue streams for publishers. You might not be familiar with the word, but if you've ever tried to post an…
The French directory publisher PagesJaunes, looking to gain on France's rising real estate market, announced today its acquisition of A Vendre A Louer, a real estate advertising section from PriceMinister. PagesJaunes wants to rival SeLoger.com, the French leader in real…
One of the big themes in local this year is the increased amount of localization in national ad campaigns. We saw it with U-Haul and Progressive Insurance a couple of weeks ago on our podium at ILM East in Boston.…
Of course, today is seeing the requisite flow of April fools antics around the interweb. I admit I was duped by Techcrunch's Google Places Filed as Spam post. But in defense, it was a day early and is actually more feasible than…
The home and trade leads space was getting a lot of attention a year ago, with a number of social media driven leads companies hoping to cut in on longtime leaders such as ServiceMagic and Angie’s List. Among the contenders:…
While we were recovering from ILM East this week, Google decided to unveil +1, the search engines answer to social networking. Not all were impressed. It’s about time, though. We have been waiting for months. While some industry experts suggest the symbol is Google’s answer to Facebook’s Like or Twitter’s tweet, I’m still digesting the impact on local and social marketing and advertising. And just to show Google that people still like it, they really really like it, Facebook announced that it now has more than 250 million mobile users.
On the blog we also covered Closely’s debut of Social Select, a way for merchants to share deals with their best customers that they can share with others. And we uncovered a post by Ross Mayfield, who strikes a chord with insights and anecdotes about how social engagement empowers organizations.
Here’s what we uncovered this week in socialsphere:
A panel I moderated at Mediabistro's Socialize conference in NYC espoused the virtues of innovating mobile products with realities of the technology in mind. Similar to a theme at last week's ILM East conference, this includes developing features at the intersection of…
Even as preprint circulars continue to account for a hefty chunk of newspaper revenues, the race to migrate these FSIs onto digital platforms that provide compelling shopping experiences and command premium CPMs is revving up. Associated Press will soon…
