New at ILM SFO 2014: Brad Stone, Author, ‘The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon’

Local’s 800 lb. gorilla is always Amazon. It has already had a huge impact on retail via showrooming. Now it has invaded Groceries, and is heading towards Services. Plus it wants to provide a full range of promotional and fulfillment services for SMBs via Amazon Offers, Amazon Web Services and other services.

At Leading in Local: Interactive Local Media, which is Dec. 3-5 at the SFO Hyatt, we’ll talk up and down Amazon and its impact on local with Brad Stone, the author of “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.” (We’ll probably get some copies as door prizes for audience members). Stone, who won the Business Book of the Year award for The Everything Store, also serves as Bloomberg Businessweek’s senior writer in San Francisco.

The show itself continues to build and build — it is likely to be one of the biggest yet.

Some of the highlights of the two-and-a-half-day show — out of many — include a keynote from Pinterest VP Joel Meek; two sessions dedicated to Google and its transformation of local; a VC session with Mucker Labs’ Will Hsu and Comcast Venture’s Michael Yang; a keynote from YP CMO Allison Checchi; a keynote from Yodle CEO Court Cunningham as Yodle preps its IPO; and a dual keynote from Deseret Media’s Clark Gilbert and Chris Lee, taking the lessons of disruptive media to heart in their remaking of the media company. Gilbert and Lee recently did a briefing for the BIA/Kelsey analysts – it was, by far, the most enlightening briefing for us this year.

We’ll also be presenting a great deal of cutting-edge BIA/Kelsey research, including findings from our exclusive survey of top loyalty executives, where we have worked to see what is working, what is not and where the momentum lies. Great insights are coming in. The Cardlinx Association has partnered with us on the survey, and Cardlinx head Silvio Tavres will be co-presenting.

Author Brad Stone, Recipient of Business Book of The Year