ILM East: The Case for Local Online Advertising

BIA/Kelsey’s top analysts kicked off this week’s ILM East conference in Boston with some data-supported insights into their respective coverage areas.

Some examples:

* Social Local Media program director Jed Williams walked the audience through his recent detailed assessment of Facebook’s IPO (aided by BIA/Kelsey’s valuations team). The bottom line? Facebook will need to produce monster growth to justify its valuation, which makes an acquisition spree almost inevitable.

* Mobile Local Media  program director Mike Boland shared some highlights from his mobile advertising forecast. His bottom line? Mobile is poised for serious growth. One indicator is the gap between mobile’s share of advertising (1%) and its share of consumer media consumption time (23%). That is a gap  that will close sooner or later.

* BIA/Kelsey research director Steve Marshall noted the increasing significance of web presence for SMB advertisers. Marshall noted that while overall media spend is stable, spending on web presence has increased significantly.

* And finally, CSO and ILM program director Matt Booth talked about the seeming odd correlation between steep loss of inter-media share and a traditional medium’s share of digital revenue. Yellow Pages, for example, has the highest share of digital among U.S. traditional media but has suffered the greatest share loss. One reason? Replacing print dollars with digital dimes.