Automotive will drive $15.13 billion in local advertising in 2015. That’s according to BIA/Kelsey’s 2015 Insights into Local Advertising report released today.

The Automotive industry, which has returned to strong growth on improved economic conditions, low fuel prices and the largely unanticipated transportation needs of Millennials, who have become the largest car-buying generational cadre in the past year. We project the segment will continue to grow at a three-percent compound annual rate through 2019.

The Automotive category includes: 1. Auto dealers & manufacturers 2. Other motor vehicle dealers 3. Auto parts & accessory stores 4. Tire dealers 5. Gas stations & auto repair. Collectively, these auto segments account for 11.1 percent of all local advertising in the United States.

Car and light-truck advertising remains heavily dependent on television advertising, with 33.9 percent of local ad spend going to television. However, digital advertising is the sole growth category in automotive, increasing by 12 percent annually. BIA/Kelsey estimates that digital, which represented $2.78 billion in local spending in 2015, will account for 30 percent of automotive advertising by 2019. All of the anticipated $2.3 billion in market growth over the next five years will come in digital channels.

The report also examines the growing importance of Millennials to automotive industry growth, despite their long-reported indifference to driving. As they age into parenthood, Millennials are buying more cars than any other generation and can be expected to drive the industry’s transition to low- or no-carbon emissions and digital in-car entertainment and marketing.

“The auto industry and television came of age together as keystones of Twentieth-Century American culture,” said Dr. Mark Fratrik, report co-author, senior vice president and chief economist at BIA/Kelsey. “The two industries remain closely tied, with the auto industry being dependent on over-the-air television advertising, and all auto vertical subcategories relying heavily on traditional media to get their message to their audience. Looking forward though, digital is going to be very important by 2019, representing nearly one-third of automotive local ad spending.”

We also offer our guidance on preparing to use vehicle-generated data and in-dash displays, mobile and PC marketing, which will be responsible for much of the digital growth as the fleet turns over to a generation of digital-enabled cars and trucks. Location, personalization and programmatic advertising will be critical to connecting the in-car experience to marketing messages.

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The report is available for purchase in the BIA/Kelsey store. Advisory clients with portal access can login to download the report.

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Uber’s low fixed costs are a key to its on-demand car services. Why then is the company seeking to acquire Nokia’s HERE Mapping business for $3 billion instead of simply partnering or cutting a deal to use the mapping service? Concurrently, Uber is raising another round of cash, reportedly between $1.5 and $2 billion, that will value the company North of $50 billion.

Uber is beginning to build out its defensive position in the market, particularly in opposition to Google’s aspirations to provide local services. Nokia’s HERE maps are included in a variety of vehicles, from Jaguar and Land Rover to Honda and Mitsubishi. Those hundreds of thousands of vehicles are a nice-to-have benefit of owning a map business, however Uber’s defensive move is to own the data, metadata and APIs for accessing maps displayed in its applications for drivers and riders, as well as to support other services that may be tied into Uber. These include delivery services and local on-demand listings tied to an Uber-aware mapping capability, which places Uber at the center of the local delivery market.

Maps are the most natural visualization tool for local services, as mobile phone applications have proven. Mobile overtook desktop search in 2014. Both mobile and web mapping are the design starting points for local search, and Uber wants to control a mapping service that can provide alternatives to Google-groomed results, which may ignore or demote non-Google results.

HERE Maps, however, is not a profitable business. In Q1 2015, HERE reported a EUR 3 million loss despite a 25 percent year-over-year increase in revenue and 29 percent increase in the number of vehicles with embedded HERE map licenses. It’s not clear that Uber is in an advantaged position when negotiating with automakers, who may favor a map provider that does not offer an alternative to personal vehicles. Google or Apple Maps may simply appear to automakers as more benign vehicle mapping licensors. But the fight is also for all the non-driving listings that may be tied to a particular mapping service, too, and it is there that Uber’s independence from Google may be a selling point for on-demand providers seeking to leverage mapping advantages over Google-listed services.

But ultimately, service providers will write applications that talk to all mapping services, so the HERE business, if acquired by Uber, could become a permanent loss-leader offered to the on-demand market in order to keep Uber driving and delivery services at the forefront of location-based search results.

While the new Uber fund-raising would cover the cost of acquiring HERE Maps, the business once acquired will become a capital-intensive operation within Uber. As Nokia points out, the maps are living documents being updated millions of times a day. This requires coders to build and enhance, people to own and operate the product, and compute capacity. It does not fit cleanly into the Uber model, in which on-demand workers fulfill demand and are off-the-books when not producing revenue. HERE Maps will represent a constant cost center as well as a revenue center that is not Uber-centric (because of the licensing and services revenue HERE Maps represent going forward), consequently, the business will put pressure on Uber’s margins.

The acquisition, if Uber wins the bidding for HERE Maps, represents a new phase in Uber’s development, and a step toward a more ordinary software-as-a-service model that also provides a pivot opportunity to move to an on-demand market services model. Perhaps Uber has decided vehicles were just one of the many commodities they can deliver on-demand.

Join us at BIA/Kelsey NOW: Rise of the Local On-Demand Economy to discuss this and many more LODE strategies.

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TaskRabbit, HomeJoy, HomeAdvisor, Handy, ClubLocal, Pro.com, Amazon Home Services and, most recently, Google, to name just a few, have entered the exploding home services market to provide in-home labor and professional workers fast access to their local market. According to a recent The New York Times article, the market is valued between $400 billion and $800 billion annually by the companies chasing this newly accessible revenue.

With that massive revenue target in mind, BIA/Kelsey is in the process of segmenting and understanding the keys to the home services, research we’ll be introducing at our upcoming NOW: The Rise of the Local On-Demand Economy Conference on June 12th in San Francisco. In this posting, we’ll discuss who the primary customer targets for these services may be. In upcoming installments, we’ll look at when potential buyers will be most ready to pay for work that has traditionally been “free.”

Of course, in economics, nothing is free, but many factors are often very poorly measured or simply ignored when talking about the value of labor in the home. With the arrival of logistics systems that aggregate supplies of labor for the home, many new costs and expenses can be included in the economic decision-making of the household. That expansion of measured labor will certainly change the perception of the work that homemakers and home repair enthusiasts have previously treated as “free labor.”

Building a paradise or hell?

Logistics and information technology has dramatically improved productivity in large enterprises. They can transform local services, too, if entrepreneurs take the time to assess their customer’s needs and ability to pay in relation to the value of work that traditionally has been treated as contributions to the family.

What’s the real opportunity, to provide services to wealthy homes or to make home services affordable for many more people than today? Home services are often dismissed as a San Francisco-bred phenomenon brewed from a mix of overpaid Millennials and under-employed local workers who will take the lowest possible wage, because they have no other options. In reality, the emerging home services market is the product of enhanced coordination and logistics made possible by technology.

The arrival of data-driven coordination and management could result in an inhumane system of exploitation in which workers fight for scraps or it can lift more people into work that serves their neighbors, their own goals and those the community values. Only the latter approach can result in a robust local economy.

The average U.S. household headed by an adult reports it consumes 23.3 hours of unpaid household work a week (for purposes of this analysis, we exclude 15-24 years from the age distribution, as they have different household maintenance requirements). Men and women contribute significantly different amounts of this “free” but economically productive work.

During their peak earning years, adults report substantially higher amounts of time spent on paid and unpaid household work in their homes, peaking at 60.2 hours per week between 35 and 44 years of age and declining to 23.6 hours for seniors older than 75. The volume of home services consumed is closely tied to the demographics of the home, with children and work, in particular, adding to the labor required to maintain the home.

Adults between 25 and 34 years of age report a spike in the total paid and unpaid household work they contribute compared to younger people (teens and young adults). Household labor increases by 91 percent, to 23.8 hours a week on average, with the arrival of children and a career. Between ages 35 and 44 years old, the average household requires 25.8 hours in unpaid work. People in these age groups report working 57.6 and 60.2 hours a week on average, respectively.

Women, however, report performing twice as much unpaid household labor as men in their late 20s and early 30s. Between 35 and 44, men take up somewhat more unpaid home work, providing 18.3 hours a week on average, but still only 55 percent as many hours as women, who turn in an average of 33.1 hours a week in unpaid labor for their household.

Welcome to the Women’s world

Women have been part of the formal workforce for less than 100 years, though their efforts have probably always been greater than men, who set the model for household history when they returned from the hunt, dropped the kill for the women to prepare and got to loafing around the fire until dinner was ready.

The first clear finding of our LODE research is that women are the primary consumers and providers of many of the services that will be swept into the on-demand market. They have traditionally controlled more of the consumer spending in the home, and now will be counted as providing most of the in-home productivity. That’s not to say that men are less likely to pay for household help than women, but it is necessary to underscore the different calculations made about household labor by women, who view spending money for in-home labor as a direct trade-off with expending their own free time on behalf of their family.

Figure 2 shows the breakout of unpaid household labor performed by women. At every age, adult women have a great deal to do to maintain their home, with the share of time dedicated to caring for children or aged parents between 25 and 44 years of age. At that time of life, all other facets of unpaid work are sidelined. General household activities, food preparation, cleaning, laundry, shopping and food shopping are shoved into spare moments. In fact, almost 90 percent of their time at home is spent on caring for children or others in the home. Driving for the household remains primarily Mom’s responsibility, too.

Men do take up much of the child-rearing burden, but surprisingly 25- to 44-year-old men do more non-food shopping than women, suggesting that personal shoppers will be increasingly important to time-starved parents. Except for the increased childcare and shopping responsibilities in their 20s to 40s, men’s share of unpaid household labor remains relatively stable throughout life. They spend roughly the same amount of time on cooking, cleaning, bookkeeping and doing lawn work (the area most dominated by men) throughout their lives.

On-demand vendors should recognize that women have already mastered time-sharing and cooperation to manage their household responsibilities. They’ve split time with other mothers and care-givers (for children and adults living in the home) and traded breaks in their day with other women, taking kids from a neighbor or friend to give them time off from mothering. Likewise, cooking and food preparation is traditionally a communal activity that can be shared, and it is natural for women to cook one or two days a week in trade for food prepared by others the rest of the week.

Novel combinations of payment and volunteerism — coordinated by a LODE vendor, who profits from revenue paid by customers who cannot spare time — will support significant networks of community labor, largely on the model pioneered by women who worked together to make their contributions to home and city. Not all work managed by a LODE vendor must be paid, it merely needs to contribute to a profit to be viable.

Given that women already spend almost twice as much of their non-workplace labor on household tasks than men, they will be drawn to on-demand services with the same care and fierce protectiveness that makes women successful mothers, CEOs and employers today. They are accustomed to the calculations that make “part-time” labor add up to a good life. On-demand vendors will benefit from studying the way women use their time at home and work, as well as how they negotiate the division of labor.

This is an excerpt from an upcoming BIA/Kelsey report, which will be presented in full at the NOW Conference in June.

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BIA/Kelsey announced the winners of the 2015 GOLOCAL Awards on Friday morning, the closing day of BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL. The awards recognize successful local marketing initiatives deployed by national brands. Sightly, PowerChord and G/O Digital captured the wins with their respective projects:

• “Lead Generation & Social Audience Engagement” [.mov] — G/O Digital
• “PowerChord STIHL Southeast First Watch YouTube” — PowerChord on behalf of STIHL
• “Local Video Ad Campaigns Deliver Results for Wendy’s” — Sightly

“Congratulations to our GOLOCAL winners, who have demonstrated strategic, innovative and results-driven approaches to national-local marketing,” said MacKenzie Lovings, VP of marketing, BIA/Kelsey. “The campaigns showcase how to make national spending on local marketing efficient and targeted. We learned so much from all the companies who entered and shared their case studies. We also thank our esteemed panel of judges for their time and expertise.”

The criteria judges applied in making the selections were the ability to make national spending on local more efficient and targeted, campaigns that drove  national-local messages with innovative technologies and services, and projects that delivered national-local sales success for the client.

G/O Digital Lead Generation and Social Audience Engagement. Welding and HVAC repair students were recruited for StrataTech, a trade learning company in G/O Digital’s campaign. “The key goal in social is making the connection,” said Marty McDonald, director of strategic accounts at G/O, a Gannett Company. “We immersed ourselves in their business and understanding what that student looks like at each stage of the process.”

The project provided targeting of students further along in the social engagement rather than just driving top-line traffic. This resuled in 3,500 quality leads and 300 enrollments in Q4, 2014. StrataTech reported that its return on the investment from the campaign grew from previous levels of approximately break-even to an 800 percent return based on G/O Digital’s approach. The training company increased new student revenue by $1.5 million in the quarter.

“G/O Digital leveraged locally-targeted paid and owned/earned content, distributed across multiple, integrated platforms, to deliver a truly strategic campaign for StrataTech, said Jed Williams, director of business development, Main Street Hub, and a judge for GOLOCAL. “The power of hyperlocal targeting is obvious in the use of distance optimization to generate qualified candidates. Ultimately, a campaign is assessed on its ability to create clear ROI that aligns with customer needs. Here, the surge in leads and enrollments that G/O Digital drove for its client demonstrates top performance.”

“Our multi-faceted program didn’t just rely on a single marketing tactic,” G/O Digital’s McDonald said after the awards program. “We leveraged paid search, retargeting, social content development and targeted Facebook ads to deliver the results the client needed — qualified lead volume and conversions into enrollments. And it helped StrataTech connect their schools and campuses to their student body in fresh, creative and personalized ways. It was a pure honor to be grouped together with some of the world’s biggest brands like Sears, Maytag and Shop Rite. To be mentioned alongside such brand heavyweights is an incredible feat in itself, not only for our client but for all of us at G/O Digital too.”

PowerChord’s STIHL YouTube First Watch campaign. “We had a goal to market a product within a business with 800 dealers in US,” said Chris Gatley, digital marketing strategist for PowerChord. The campaign, instead of focusing on retail locations, created a product relationship designed to drive customers to specific parts of the stores where Stihl chainsaws, leaf blowers and other SKUs are available. The program was tested with 800 dealers in the Southeast and, when a consumer clicked through from YouTube, connected the consumer directly to a retail store page.

“PowerChord, Inc. is grateful to be recognized by BIA/Kelsey for the STIHL YouTube FIrst Position Campaign last fall,” said Nikkie Vegenski, director of digital marketing at PowerChord. “As the digital agency partner for STIHL Inc. and STIHL Southeast, PowerChord is really proud of the local success and increased visibility earned for these individual, participating STIHL Dealers.”

PowerChord took advantage of Google’s First Position placement program, which provides targeting based on user location during a short pre-roll video advertisement. When a consumer clicked, they were presented a targeted landing page based on local retail sites that promote in-store deals. YouTube First Position drops a cookie on the YouTube viewer’s browser that allows remarketing of the STIHL offer across the Web. The messages consistently emphasized dealer relationship, making destinations of local retail outlets, instead connecting with STIHL directly. “We wanted to create a one-to-one connection with the brand and the stores,” Gatley said.

When opening a dealer page, the viewer sees the same video they saw on YouTube, displayed in the background to reinforce the brand message while a regional locater asks for the user’s ZIP Code to identify a specific nearby store. The campaign involved generating a microsite for each location with reviews and information about services available at the dealer location. The program drove 8.1 million impressions in three weeks across thee states targeting males, ages 30 to 54 years of age. During the campaign, 474,000 users engaged with the pre-roll ad or a remarketing ad for a cost of $0.14 cents per completed view and a total cost of $0.18 cents per engagement.

The program is planned to run again for some of the STIHL dealers regionally during 2015, and potentially nationally in 2016.

“Sightly’s Local Video Ad Campaigns Deliver Results for Wendy’s”. Sightly set out to improve audience targeting and boost response rates with its video campaign for for Wendy’s, the fast-food chain. “We worked with Wendy’s on location targeting,” said John McIntyre, Founder and CEO of Sightly. “We want to rid the world of annoying commercials by making them significantly more relevant and targeted.”

“It is a great honor to be recognized by BIA/Kelsey and its panel of expert digital marketing judges for the innovative work we did for Wendy’s,” John McIntyre said. “Our video ad platform is built for multi-local brands and their agencies, and these campaigns showed the kind of exceptional results we can drive through our powerful combination of dynamic ad personalization and audience micro-targeting, delivered across all screens at the local level.”

To accomplish the targeting, Sightly and Wendy’s blended demographic, geo-location, known consumer behaviors and a mobile-device strategy to augment commercial placements on major sports-related networks. “We’re employing a second-generation tool to leverage programmatic in order to reach micro-targets based on what they search for, what they watch, where they are,” McIntyre said. He explained that the program was able to deliver thousands of variations on the ads based on the audience profile. It was a pr0cess that took 17 months to develop prior to Sightly’s innovation, which reduced the ad customization process to less than four hours using programmatic elements to target on the fly.

Applying their understanding of consumer context in a sports enthusiast market, Sightly conducted a nine-day pilot, that produced double-digit increases in the number of views of Wendy’s ads. In nine days, ads in a single DMA produced 360,000 video views and 1,000 clicks on a $1-off coupon offer. A second test of six weeks in three DMAs resulted in 544,000 video views and 1,800 clicks on the $1-off coupon offer. Sightly and Wendy’s are now working to address segmentation by day part and has begun addressing football fans in each reagion with a personalized message, such as “Go Buckeyes” messages in Ohio State viewer areas.

This year’s judges for the GOLOCAL Awards included:

Teri Guill, President, Social Media Club Dallas
Asif R. Khan, Founder & President Location Based Marketing Association (LBMA)
Nancy Lane, President, Local Media Association (LMA)
Scott Vann, President, Dallas/Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association
Abhi Vyas, Vice President, Marketing, MetroMedia Technologies (Representing AMA Dallas Chapter)
Dave Walker, Co-Founder & CEO, bizHive.com
Jed Williams, Director of BD, MainStreetHub

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Chief Marketing Officers are in “an exclusive club that drinks a lot and makes bad decisions,” Dave Walker, Chairman, BizHive, told BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL.

His tongue-in-cheek opening statement set the stage for a rapid-fire dissection of the disconnect that afflicts the national/local conversation. An accomplished marketer who has led go-to-market strategies for Walmart, Microsoft, Toys R Us, and Home Depot, among others, he recently launched BizHive, an SMB advertising and marketing services marketplace.

Walker kicked off his session explaining the results of the CMO Council’s survey of CMO satisfaction with their local marketing:

* Only eight percent of CMOs reported being satisfied with their current local marketing.
* This despite the fact that 57 percent of national brand marketers say local is critical to success.
* 63 percent had “nothing in place for their local measurements.”
* Only seven percent of CMOs say they currently have a successful local marketing program in place.

Walker suggested that today’s CMO lives by The Three C’s: Capture, Captivate, Convert, which are intimately linked to their compensation, but can interfere with addressing the customer on their terms. A sea change in thinking is necessary for a transformation of local marketing, which currently lives on a leash held by national marketers who discount the importance of individual preferences.

A language barrier

“We are seeing that there are so many ways to describe “local” that this is part of the problem,” Walker said. “Everyone has a different definition. So, who is defining ‘local?’ Is it a service, a technology, a map?” In 1980, when he started his CMO career, Walker said, CMOs defined local with lines on maps.

By the 1990s, they were using demographic, density and drive-time maps in addition to simple geographic distinctions. In the 2000s, predictive heat maps gave CMOs the illusion that they could predict the outcome of programs. Digital changed all that, Walker said, exposing the chasm between the careful plans of national brands and the messy reality of local marketing.

“Today, the customer defines ‘local,'” Walker said. Marketers try to track customers all day, and have made “serving the new targeting.” Simple connectivity issues have redefined “trade areas” and “tracking,” leading CMOs to talking about “marketing localized in motion.” He described a fractured perspective, exacerbated a lot of products and services and technologies that are designed into the local model, but, Walker asked, “what goals do they serve?” That question is not answered, yet.

Instead of talking about local-to-national or national-to-local, marketers need to make the distinction between local and local-at-scale. Are local programs aimed at the market or are they national campaigns with many local instances that don’t map to the consumer’s definition of their local needs. “We’re not talking about the collective power of all the localized activities marketers undertake today,” Walker argued.

It’s still all about the numbers

Marketing remains all about making your numbers, and this has been true throughout Walker’s career. Yet make-or-break metrics are not applied in local — 60 percent of CMOs, as seen, don’t have local measurements in place. They are “flying blind,” Walker said.

To get into a marketing program’s efficacy at the personal level is tremendously difficult challenge. With so many different metrics now that we no longer need to bet the farm on one metric or one solution, Walker said, pointing out that this leads to marketers having no standards for success.

“We can leverage that [lack of consistent metrics],” he said. “Let’s encourage multi-variate testing and learning at the local level to help marketers tune their message and mechanisms.” Walker added an endorsement for QualPro which said is “the premiere provider in MVT testing [for] highly complex decision-support at speed.”

We know we need multi-variate analytics, that it is a daily challenge, Walker continued. “We’re waiting for more technologies to answer that call. Today, only 11 percent of CMOs have a local marketing program in place. This is because most logistics and supply chain and inventory management tools are not connected across local markets. Walmart can do it, why not bring that to the local marketplace? Then we have the ability to make decisions in a very sophisticated way across many different markets.

The Berlin Wall of Corporate Culture

Walker delivered a caveat for technologists seeing nails everywhere their hammers can reach: “Before you build the machine, you have to address the cultural barriers to adoption by companies.” Companies, including brands and media firms, need to change. It is not simply a matter of introducing new technology. The real cultural bias today is not “national-to-local” but “corporate-to-field,” he said. “Corporate makes the the plan and the field takes it apart.”

In the physical marketplace, all dimension of business are locally defined, but marketing has not localized. Marketing very often operates from the top a mountain, issuing dictates in a loud voice, versus acting as the hub of a wheel. Marketers must suppress the impluse to control and dictate everything, Walker said. There was a palpable wave of relief, followed immediately by nervous laughter among audience members. Truth, at last, with a dose of responsibility.

CMO principles

Walker shared the CMO Council’s response to the survey results, three simple changes that can transform the local marketing conversation:

Enable Local Web. “Just do it. Stop with the hand-wringing.”

Enable Local Networks. Let stores have their own sites, pages, and conversations with their customers, don’t funnel everything through a national filter.

Enable a Local Point of View. “Local is not a step-child, it is where business actually is transacted,” Walker said.

These three things will start the change marketing needs to address the local market, Walker concluded. Let things bubble up organically. Let contributions to your programs come from the local level, he urged as he concluded.

Walker summarized his three-year-old startup, BizHive: The company served more than 30,000 SMBs in the US, who shop for marketing and advertising services at the site. The SMBs become better educated and qualified leads for vendors and resellers. They also white label communities, such as for Sprint, which launched a BizHive-powered site called Sprint Resource Marketplace. These programs are combined with in-person events offered by BizHive that help SMBs make better decisions. Walker said it is a boot-camp approach that is working.

During the Q&A, Walker added these tips:

CMOs these days need to be CIOs. “If you are not technically savvy, you will not be a CMO long.”

“When we were planning national spending, we were ignoring local.”

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As the Local On-Demand Economy (LODE) evolves, more interaction between merchants, brands and customers will take place in rich media environments where the click is only one step, albeit still important, to improved customer engagement, satisfaction and conversion rates. We’ll be covering this emerging economy at BIA/Kelsey NOW in June (sign up today for the early-registration discount), but the topic is a hot one at our NATIONAL Conference this week.

“You’ve got so much information from just the click [on Google], but we have hundreds of keywords [in each call],” Jeremiah Wilson, founder and president of LogMyCalls, said in an on-stage conversation. That is an important insight that extends beyond marketers to political operatives and all breeds of persuasive messaging will need to embrace in the Local On-Demand Economy. It requires immense listening skills, algorithmic creativity and judicious use of insights to engage the person at the other end of a transaction.

The explosion of data in the enterprise during the last decade will be arriving in local markets through hosted services and resellers, such as media and marketing services companies. Search, which has dominated the past decade will continue to grow, but as we’ve heard repeatedly throughout the BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL Conference, there are many more steps to personalize the engagement with consumers.

The conversation, the basic unit of human communication (tweets, to provide contrast, are fragments of conversations), will be the new locus of analysis as the digital engagement model diversifies and lengthens the customer relationship to include pre-sales to post- and repeat-sales delivered to individual users. People think primarily in terms of their local context when making buying decisions. Can I get it in Tacoma? Will I be able to get support in Cleveland? Is this doctor trusted by people I know? All these questions rise out of the give-and-take of a conversation.

“Markets are conversations,” the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto famously wrote, and the implications for brands, media and small business are straight-forward: Far more information needs to be wrapped into efforts to understand and engage with the customer. This must happen in an environment respectful of the individual’s sense of privacy and propriety.

That data flood is already relevant in the enterprise, in the form of “big data,” an over-used but telling name for the inevitable increase in analyzable data. In the LODE world, these capabilities will be pushed to the edge of the economy, where SMBs and customers meet in their local market.

Add sensor data from beacons, dumb and autonomous vehicles being tracked by network services, the growth of customer feedback as a key influence of purchases, and the question for every business will become “What do I need to know about this customer, an individual, now?” Simple segmentation will not suffice when products and services can be customized within the supply chain based on the information shared publicly and privately (between buyer and seller) in the digital engagement process.

In the call analysis space, LogMyCalls, CallSource, Century Interactive and others already provide vertical-specific “language sets” to analyze, for example, calls to automotive dealers, medical offices and other specialty conversations. Within a decade, it will be possible to optimize any digital engagement, including phone calls, customer support chats, webinars and, in regulated businesses, enforce the disclosure of information required by law when talking with a customer.

Take for example CrystalKnows, a personality analysis tool for marketers and professionals that promises to “end email miscommunication.” BIA/Kelsey friend-of-the-company Mike Orren of Speakeasy pointed this out over lunch today. A “proprietary personality detection technology” developed in the Harvard Innovation Lab, CrystalKnows crawls and analyzes public sources, such as blogs and social postings, to provide a profile of a person and recommend how to communicate with them effectively. It’s recommendations, when I run a report about myself, are useful tips, but it also rings of the kind of generalities that astrologers and psychics use to convince people they are predicting the future or identifying a dead relative who wants to talk. Nevertheless, it’s an impressive beginning.

In all fairness, one thing CrystalKnows tells me about my own work style is that I give blunt feedback. So, I don’t regret the astrology and psychic comment above. CrystalKnows should not be surprised, but will their algorithm grok the humor here? Given resources and time, it will be possible to automate email targeting individuals, shaping offers based on known consumer traits, and many other proto-creepy engagements that still require human artfulness and, if business hopes to have paying customers in the future, will continue to require human engagement at key moments.

The Local On-Demand world, in which data proliferation raises customer expectations that a brand or company will know, understand and treat them personally, the proliferation of conversational intelligence tools will be a vital area of investment and development.

Conversational Intelligence will play a role in brand awareness, employee retention in the 1099 economy, word-of-mouth and personalized communication in work and the local market. Scoring and measurement of successful communication, from analyzing voice calls to, potentially, conversations at the point of sale, to provide a full view of attribution in the ever more complex world in which we will live. We’ll be talking about the consequences at NOW this June. Join us for the conversation.

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Karen Traversi Kovalesi, President & CEO, Geary LSF, a San Francisco integrated digital marketing agency, told BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL that marketers and brands must think across media and organizational boundaries to bring customers to a transaction decision.

“You get business results, not just business tactics,” she said. “Omni-Channel is a mindset, not just a business practice.” Geary LSF must work to create unique combinations of digital messaging and engagements to bridge he national/local marketing challenge, Taversi Kovaleski told the audience, sharing examples from three industries, professional placement, healthcare and consumer products.

“Local reigns supreme,” she said. “Brands get people to the door, but once they are engaged they are looking for something personal about the purchase — these are local decisions.” Even in B2B purchases, which many believe are fairly cut-and-dried standardized decisions, the individual wants to be informed very early in the process, which requires multiple messaging options to address the lead. In the consumer space, too, there are many touchpoint along the way rather than a single monolithic campaign “But many of our clients, we find, are not doing that,” she said.

She pointed to three clients: Kelly Services; MedStar Washington Hospital Center, BumbleBee, the seafood company.

Kelly is a global leader in workforce solutions. Over the past few years, the workforce Kelly supports has changed to emphasize skills over location — work can now be performed anywhere. Hiring companies no longer need to see Kelly reps. It allows Kelly to reach more potential business partner/customers through digital, which opens an engagement process that can be fulfilled largely online. Individuals doing the work, however, do like to talk to someone, to get the personal touch, so Kelly must balance its hiring company-facing messaging with local opportunities for business talent to connect and learn about the opportunities with Kelly.

“The question is ‘How do you fill that pipeline when you don’t have as many local offices?'” The Kelly offices used to define the for workers who may now interact with the company first and primarily through digital channels. But when there is a physical engagement, it must align with and reinforce the online message.

The Kelly Services brand has evolved and they need to harmonize that message in marketing channels as the markets continues to morph based on new technology. The change cuts both ways. For example, Kelly now fills senior positions. It’s not just about the typing pool of its early years.

“Are the right level of people thinking of me in terms of finding their [employment] opportunity?” Traversi Kovaleski asked. The answer as “no” too often, she said.

When Kelly Services wanted to enter the IT talent market, they partnered with Geary LSF. Rather than doing traditional recruitment messaging, they launched a thought leadership content marketing program targeted at the people they want to place, senior level IT managers. Using thought leadership content across channels was critical to showing Kelly understood the IT market. The outcome was that IT pros did start to reach out to Kelley and they filled their pipeline, giving them the human resources to succeed in the IT placement market.

“Content marketing did work — now we can leverage across to other areas,” she said, including native advertising and mobile, as well as SEO aimed at recruiting talent to the IT space.

“It’s about measurement. We start to layer the insights using geo-targeting, feedback and attribution to understand how they work together to achieve brand goals,” Traversi Kovaleski said. The campaign continued to develop and now includes video on LinkedIn aimed at recruitment and brand awareness for Kelly in the IT market.

MedStar Washington Hospital Center, a Washington D.C. specialty hospital that is nationally known, with a have a regional marketing footprint.

The question, “How can they draw patients from other regions?” defined the project. Because MedStar provides services to a network of hospitals, the campaign had to succeed without cannibalizing partner hospitals in the region. Ultimately, the campaign aimed at reaching potential customers two or three states away, as well as globally.

The Geary LSF plan targeted patients based on condition, using SEO to connect with people with specific illnesses. Starting with that paid search, it delivers urgent patient engagement. Next, “we need to get them to make an appointment,” even across state lines. Here, Traversi Kovaleski said, video and social come into play. Patients find common cause in social environments, where doctor recommendations are shared based on actual experience with MedStar.

“People want to understand the doctor and the tools they’ll use.” At this point in the funnel, Geary LSF introduced video stories. “They are small and consumable and can be displayed with localized slugs to deliver relevant messages.” How do I engage an individual to take action, she asked and provided the answer: Video and social.

“Facebook can play a more integral part in the final step [to a transaction],” she added. In healthcare, the sharing of experience can trigger the final outcome. In reviews, Facebook isn’t a last-click experience, but it’s an important step that must be augmented by marketing tools. The human touch is essential to the healthcare market, she concluded. (See BIA/Kelsey’s Healthcare Vertical Industry report, released last week.)

With BumbleBee, Geary LSF had a different problem. BumbleBee is a product brand competing in retail environments with other products.

BumbleBee is in the midst of the rollout of its new “SuperFresh” frozen seafood currently in select cities and stores across the U.S. They select key stores in markets, so ZIP Code targeting is not appropriate, because a store could be very remote to many people in a postal code region.

MaxPoint, a Geary LSF partner, allowed BumbleBee to use intent targeting within a ZIP Code, providing more granularity in the message and targeting customers of specific stores. At the point of engagement online, typically a coupon offer, video was effective to point consumers to the stores.

This push model will eventually give way to opt-in coupons delivered on the phone or an in-store kiosk, Traversi Kovaleski said. These “pull offers are more humane and engaging. “We not doing anything ‘too crazy,’ she explained, but the brand must think in terms of a series of steps that marketers need to exectue on to deliver the client’s desired results by moving customers efficiently from initial brand awareness to a buying decision.

When asked how BumbleBee use beacons, Traversi Kovaleski said the use of MaxPoint data to identify specific geo-targets will make the engagement more personal. Early geo-fencing efforts by the brand were “a little creepy,” so she is urging clients to use opt-in couponing. She said the move to pull versus push will demand very personalized offers.

It’s notable that in each case she cited, video played a critical role. It puts a face and voice on a product or service, and is a vital complement to social, where largely anonymous interactions can be converted to personal engagement.

The mindset of omni-channel is to think across boundaries within your organization, to segment markets and address customers individually, Traversi Kovaleski said. She added that it is critical to think of supplementing organic search with paid search which moves consumers toward individually meaningful experience. Personal touches in user experience are critical. It must be combined with measurement, which can be “less specific than we currently like,” to support an omni-channel marketing process.

Asked by BIA/Kelsey’s Charles Laughlin about the toughest part of the national/local process, she said “Consistency when going to the field.”

With BumbleBee it is message alignment is easier because it is a corporate message defined by product, she explained. A Kelly, on the other hand, may have locations battling with one another locally, which needs to be curbed to ensure consistent messaging to the market. This echoed a key message from yesterday’s sessions about franchise marketing: Messages must be focused on the customer instead of the “local battles” franchisees or different teams within a business may think they are fighting.

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Stacey Sedbrook and Peter Krasilovsky of BIA/Kelsey led a SuperForum to end Day One of BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL. Panelists included:

Steve Lanzano, President & CEO, TVB Local Media Marketing Solutions
Grant Moise, Sr. VP, Business Development, The Dallas Morning News
Ethan Selzer, Vice President, Retail & Regional Advertising, The Washington Post
Pam Taylor, Corporate Director of Digital Sales, Meredith Corp.

All this is paraphrased reportage, except for passages in quotes, which are verbatim.

Peter Krasilovsky: Many people don’t understand the national reach of a newspaper. How do you explain your papers’ national reach?

Grant Moise: The Dallas Morning News benefits from the Dallas Cowboys. Fifty-percent of visitors come from outside the market, and they visit for the Cowboys.

Ethan Selzer: The Washington Post is a national political publication. The company is organizing candidate-based packages to support voter decision-making. It’s a myth that newspaper readers have already decided who they will vote for — they read to learn and decide.

Since Jeff Bezos bought the Post, it has added 10 million regular readers, compared to 38 million before the acquisition 18 months ago. He cares about audience growth.

Native Advertising started as a corporate initiative. It started with a mattress company, Mattress Warehouse, where decisions are high consideration and infrequent. Native campaigns can help people understand complex things the media would not cover. The articles were about the value of sleep and quality of sleep for the individual. It was “shared massively.”

Stacey Sedbrook: How has the SpeakEasy relationship at The Dallas Morning News?

Moise: Print is still declining, down seven percent annually. With SpeakEasy, we are building a business that allows local business to engage with the audience in a social setting. We call it a content marketing agency for national, but it is a social marketing service for our local customers.

Krasilovsky: “National” is often misused, because it often means “regional.” How do your papers engage the region?

Moise: We focus on the local enterprise space and regional marketing for the North Texas region, bringing in advertising from Oklahoma City, New Orleans and elsewhere because they see Dallas as the regional leader.

Selzer: Our newsroom investment drives what advertisers buy. For example, our arts coverage, which is the only such coverage in the region, drives a lot of arts advertising. We also have the resources of a global brand to address the local audience, so we tend to “crack” experiments with customers who are trying something (with The Post) that they are trying for the first time.

Sedbrook: How is your national ad team changing at the The Dallas Morning News?

Moise: We had 10 sales reps serving national advertisers a decade ago. Now we have two. We address five percent of the US population, but in our marketing automation business we have customers across the company. We are not limited to the Dallas region, but we’ve really scaled back.

We partner with companies that represent us to national accounts.

Selzer: The Post is “quite the opposite.” We have a regional team in D.C. and a national sales team in New York to go after advertisers who come to the Post from across the country, because 90 percent of our visitors are outside Washington. When we get referred to an agency, we can go to our national team who already has contact with those agencies every week.

The Dallas Morning News, 80 percent of local advertising is digital. The Post’s national advertising split is 50/50, but at the local level the mix is more like Dallas, at 80-20.

Krasilovsky: How is mobile playing in your businesses? National mobile will be at 60 percent in 2019, versus about 38 percent today.

Moise: We had gone to major retailers in the past [pitching] mobile, but they didn’t want to hear about our own solution. They want a consolidated offering, not many different offers. CashDash is a new investment to address mobile users. It is a geofenced service that uses a photo taken by the user of receipts to generate the incentive pay-out (such as $50 back on $250 in spending), which is in the user’s accounts the next day. It has driven up to $100,000 in sales for some advertisers.

Now, we add the television panelists.

Sedbrook: Broadcast hasn’t seen the “freefall” that print has, so are you behind the newspapers?

Steve Lanzano: Tier One advertisers are “carpet-bombing” and we see most of our digital in local and regional. So, we showed the impact on sales from local advertising is better. We created a virtual car dealership to let shoppers view cars online, which has converted national spending into buyers to local outlets.

Sedbrook: What is the definition of “national?”

Taylor: Meredith defines local as any sale in the geographic region. All business is local to the customer.

Selzer: Businesses that want to reach Washington in addition to every other part of the country are “national” customers. All business and politics is local.

Krasilovsky: How are you working with other media?

Moise: In Dallas, we do some content sharing with television. But from an advertising standpoint we are not actively selling in partnership with the television stations — The Morning News used to own the local ABC affiliate, and it didn’t work to cross-sell then.

Selzer: The Post doesn’t work with television [to sell advertising, the Post does produce video].

Lanzano: TV drives scale. Our digital assets bring targeting and personalization. So, now agencies see the world as a barbell, with TV on one end and digital at the other, with everything else thinly distributed between them. The role of the individual media is what it all comes down to — it’s not an “or” question, but an “and” question.

Sedbrook: How are you dealing with cord-cutters?

Lanzano: The on-demand services don’t address local broadcasters with a viable price for consumers. Consumers want local content, not just national content. Television segments by demographic, e.g. ESPN is watched by men. The bundles don’t work without local [any more than they could do without ESPN).

Taylor: Our local sales reps in Phoenix worked with Volkswagen to reach visitors for the Super Bowl and two other major sporting events that weekend. We used geo-fencing to address attendees to the different events, and it resulted in greater opportunities with Volkswagen. We need to make the process simple, so that rep-side people know how to reach the local station to configure an offer.

Sedbrook: Relationships sell. People will buy from the rep firms they like. How important are good local rep firm relationships?

Lanzano: In programmatic, the salesperson is “liberated” because they don’t need to configure all the preferences for each advertiser, it’s done with automation. But you still need the relationships. Franchises are usually important — for example, when a concept gets to a certain distribution in the U.S., it goes to national — because it works. At that point, the concepts can fail because the local sales touch is lost. In two franchise restaurant scenarios, I showed them that they needed to allocate more to local to get the penetration they want for the budget they have.

Sedbrook: Does “spray and pray” work — going for reach to everybody? Or is targeting more important?

Lanzano: It’s all about targeting. Programmatic is about targeting. Take the data stacks and pick the audience you want to reach. That’s the beauty of programmatic. You need a system for [targeting] and television may have reach to audiences at a key buying decision-point that we don’t currently recognize.

Sedbrook: Do pay walls work?

Moise: The whole idea of pay walls is to subsidize paper with digital. Thirty percent of paper subscribers buy digital, which doesn’t offset our print lost revenue. So, we backed off on the pay wall and are studying it.

Selzer: We are still exploring how to use pay walls. You can get a premium for premium digital content and still keep your regular audience. We are using first- and third-party data to augment traditional media, such as direct-mail, when they are online. If they weren’t a subscriber, we can get the same content as a mailer circular contains to them in different ways with digital.

Now data and analytics have become a big part of how circulars are optimized. We’ve joined a consortium to share first-party data with other papers to learn more about how to target. We can show advertisers a more efficient and effective way to distribute the same number of circulars, which has been welcomed by all. Once we’ve optimized all our circulars, we will have a better view of where the next dollar of ad spend should go.

Lanzano: At the end of the day, it’s all about content. We need to distribute, measure and get paid for content, then it’s all good. If we put good content out we’ll succeed.

Moise: Some advertisers don’t see the newspaper as a content vehicle, it’s just for delivering ads. We’re just a cheaper solution to put something onto a lawn instead of a mailbox. We’ve acquired a number of companies, such as Distribion, to provide centralized marketing control across different channels to advertisers. It’s a very sophisticated digital hub for all your digital advertising needs. Distribion can support permission-based marketing to preserve the nationally advertised terms that the advertiser defined. Software can control how national brands get into local markets.

Krasilovsky: You’re not a well-defined niche business anymore [to the Dallas Morning News].

Moise: We’re a hybrid, we’ve gone rogue.

Taylor: We’re about local, we can help national brands reach local. We have digital solutions that help brands reach local through broadcast and digital. We will explore partnerships with other companies if it makes sense.

Audience: What is the panel’s opinion of Nielsen purchasing Excelate?

Lanzano: I think they are going into programmatic, but I don’t see how they can do that as measurement company, which needs to be third-party [to the ad transaction] so I am as curious as you.

In response to the question of digital opportunities, everyone on the panel believes it is still early, that there are lots of upside.

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This is a paraphrased report, quotes indicate what was actually said.

Over half of U.S. businesses spend over $1,000 without any predefined customer acquisition goals. Platform providers, agencies and advertisers can be part of the solution, according to AdMall CEO C. Lee Smith who spoke today at BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL.

Franchises, according to BIA/Kelsey, spend 27 percent more than other SMBs. It’s better to reach people who count than to count how many people you reach. This kind of targeting is possible with digital marketing. So, define your audience to get started in ad improvements.

Franchise marketers should consider using Purchase Intent as a defining criteria for audiences. Not everyone is going to buy — one may not read a boating magazine because the want to buy a boat. For example, in furniture, audiences often are looking for inspiration, which doesn’t have to be the cheapest furniture. Thirty-seven percent of furniture buyers have Pinterest accounts. Two-thirds have a particular store in mind before they start surfing — so branding is critical.

61 percent of shoppers showroom when shopping at furniture stores, looking for a better price.

Another type of buying intent: Heavy Frequency Purchasers spend 5x more on fast-food. Their digital use revolves around convenient sharing with friends and finding new things to try. Frequent fast-food eaters are 3.5x more likely to use FourSquare, 88 percent more likely to take action on a promotional email, and 37 percent will try new things they discover through social. They are enrolled in 23 percent more loyalty programs as the typical American.

Purchase Intent: Personal Goals — or “aspirational.” Example: People ready to move. They click to call 74 percent more often and 50 percent to look for repair services online. They are 82 percent more likely to have used HomeAdvisor.

Other critical purchase intent: B2B planned purchases and dissatisfied customers (cable customers top this list).

How would you redefine your audience based on purchase intent, then drill in and learn everything about them? Do a few things well, be the go-to source on your chosen topics/targets. Aim for where your target audience is, don’t reach everywhere.

You don’t need big data, you need big insight. Connect your brand to the customer’s hears and minds, it’s not all about reach.

Don’t let your franchisees’ fights with local competitors interfere with your national brand goals. Tell franchisees why they need to aim above the fray they think they are fighting.

“New doesn’t always mean better.” Use existing media where it works.

Now to Q&A:

Rick Ducey of BIA/Kelsey: You described fast-food users as active, but are they brand loyal?

Smith: It could be a bit of both. If they are in many loyalty programs, they will choose, but they will choose based on communication from those brands.

Ducey: On the moving marketing, there is clustering data to exploit in selling related services.

Smith: When you reserve a U-Haul truck, you could also pay for a repairman to fix a hole in the house you are leaving, so it’s a great opportunity to grow the customer relationships.

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Jon Czaja, Director, Small Business (North America), Facebook, talks with Abid Chaudhry, Senior Director of Strategy at BIA/Kelsey. This is a paraphrased report, quotes indicate verbatim comments.

Beginning with a walkthrough of what Facebook is doing to help brands connect with local consumers. Facebook has evolved dramatically. Gone are the days of focus on things like page likes and we’ve made a transition to providing a robust marketing platform.

30 million businesses have active pages on Facebook; 2 million are actively advertising on Facebook. There is a huge diversity in these businesses, from small to large and across all verticals that find value on this platform. The obvious reason is reach. More than 1 billion use Facebook every day, the vast majority on their mobile phone. Facebook Mobile users spend an average of 41 minutes a day consuming content on their phone.

Targeting is more accurate than the average online platform: 38 percent of targets are accurate on average, while Facebook is 89 percent accurate. “We’re talking about real people and not cookies.”

Example business: Divas SnowGear. They use Facebook to market cold weather gear to women.

Businesses can also enhance their targeting by “bringing their own data onto Facebook” to narrow and retarget messaging on Facebook. Additionally, Facebook can show “lookalike” customers who have similar characteristics to your existing customers.

Local Awareness is a product for multi-site businesses. The platform allows targeting of people near your stores, based on their use of Facebook (which can monitor location all the time if the user has approved). Shows Jasper’s Market as example: The company went from brand awareness to actual customer conversion through Facebook. Warby Parker have reached 5.2 million people with 31.7 million impressions for its 10 retail locations. It will be “very easy to create local campaigns for small business in many markets.”

He can’t share what Facebook is planning, but Conversion Lift is an current example of a tool to see the efficacy of Facebook ads, using a A/B model to analyze the impact of Facebook on offline transactions. “Not a new feature in the market, but new to Facebook.”

FacebookMarketingPartners.com is the destination for marketers to identify partners on Facebook that they can use to increase their reach and targeting accuracy.

Now to Q&A:

Abid asks: Are we seeing a pivot toward direct-response and conversion products at Facebook. What was the decision-making process for that move — have you left the brand advertiser in the lurch?

Jon: We believe Facebook can be relevant for both merchants and brand advertisers. We realized we have the ability to drive consumers to local business locations. That said, Facebook is still a powerful branding platform. Page likes were the branding solution on FB, but today we are concentrating on video. Advertisers can bid on impressions and position on pages as a result.

Abid: How to you keep this easy to use for the small advertiser while serving the large advertisers? Will everyone use the same UI?

Jon: We want it to be self-serve, all the way down to the smallest advertiser. Large brands use additional tools, such as “Power Manager” to control large campaigns with the same [backend system]. It is a different user interface and we’re seeing large advertisers partnering with agencies and others to address national brands.

Facebook is listening to advertisers and trying to speak their language. We’ve grown up and learned to think in terms and metrics that brands use.

Question from Audience: Are people feeling the new ads are effective or are they annoyed by them?

Jon: It’s about protecting the user’s experience. Customers have said they feel there are too many irrelevant ads, so we have reduced and changed the way we place ads. It makes sense that we keep the environment personally engaging and relevant, including the ads.

Abid: What is the view on native advertising’s impact on the user experience? How much does Facebook get involved in keeping ads relevant?

Jon: It’s a challenge. How do you convince a small business to take a good picture or shoot a good video. So, we share best practices and encourage business to look at competitors to understand what works well. We’ve also started sharing a “relevance score” that shows how the algorithm that handles newsfeed placement works, so that business can make adjustments. We also encourage people to test ads, to see what images work. You can experiment on Facebook to quickly modify your approach.

Audience: Can a business use Power Editor to run these ads? What do SMBs do now, while we wait?

Jon: Anyone can use Power Editor. But I recommend you don’t use it unless you are placing hundreds of thousands of ad impressions. In the interim, there are third-parties that can help business get effective performance.

Abid: As Facebook becomes more advertising centric, how is the Partner Program going to integrate the partners’ needs?

Jon: Facebook can’t build everything itself. If there are other partners out there to build on our platform and encourage better performance, then advertisers will be able to choose to go to Facebook or an agency. It’s an “All-of-the=Above” strategy.

Abid: Facebook is becoming a better competitor with Google, but do you think of Google as the target?

Jon: We’re sort of in our own world. We are in a race to close the loop on the offline transaction, but I can’t share much information now.

Abid: How is the inclusion of friend-to-friend payments related to the future of advertising and transactions? What’s the strategy for working with large agencies?

Jon: The message to both is the same. We have a billion users a day. The way you talk to advertisers changes based on their size and scale. We work to help big campaigns elevate effectively, and measurements for large partners to help understand the impact of a Facebook ad investment. With smaller businesses, we’re working to build out what I hope will be best-in-class customer service to help them advertise on Facebook.

Abid: Is there a strategy for working with services industries?

Jon: We are vertically focused within the sales teams and think there are best practices among large businesses. We’re going to bring those vertical insights all the way down to the small business.

We’ve seen success with Local Awareness, which was designed for small business. But we think it has uses for multi-site national brands. The ability to target people near your store will be a benefit to business of every size.

Audience: Your partner program has restraints on small agencies, with less than 1,000 clients. Will that change?

Jon: Not that I know, but if you have not checked our recent updates, you may find it has already changed.

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