Google has been launching lots of products to carry its search dominance into a mobile world. Given that 4 out of 5 mobile minutes happen in-app, this sidesteps the very place where its dominance has been established: the browser. We recently had the chance to talk to Google about its vision (video below).

This ties in with things we’ve examined recently such as deep linking and push notifications. Google Now is also a key product the company is building for app-based local discovery and commerce. Many of these products were advanced and clarified during last week’s I/O conference.

Google’s Brendon Kraham is close to all of this, as the guy in charge of “building and developing Google’s next $1 Billion+ ad businesses.” That’s is obviously a big task and Kraham is examining lots of ways to extend Google’s capabilities, data and search dominance into this new mobile-oriented world.

In addition to the above products, this involves carrying forward Google’s legacy of innovation in performance-based local ads. In mobile, that translates to offline attribution, a la Estimated Total Conversions. This is just one way Google is planting its flag in the next decade’s ad equation.

“It’s still early, but I can see the future that is coming and even now we have the proxy metrics of ‘did somebody go into a store’,” Kraham told us, “and actually closing the loop with third party data partners for a store transaction. It just takes a bit more heavy lifting to get those insights.”

The video of his presentation and fireside chat is embedded below.

The post What Does the Next Era of Local Search Look Like? (Video) appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Though “mopocalypse’s” impact didn’t live up to its hype, mobile website optimization remains critical. That’s particularly true for multi-location businesses that compete in several different markets at once. It’s all about getting data cleansed and organized.

That plays out in lots of ways, which we examined with Placeable during a session at BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL. The company has a good perspective as it works directly with lots of brands to get their location data and localized marketing strategies in order.

You can see my interview with the company embedded below, as well as chapter links that take you to each of the five “tips” we went over for optimizing multi-location campaigns. Stay tuned for lots more conference video footage.

Video chapter links

Multi-location marketing: who’s doing it best
Tip #1: Create landing pages for every location
Tip #2: Ways to make sure landing pages are complete and accurate
Tip #3: Make sure offers and promotions are refreshed often
Tip #4: Include comprehensive reviews and sources
Tip #5: Mobile landing pages: how to navigate mopocalypse
Conclusions & takeaways

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All eyes are on Facebook when it comes to localized marketing. This was pronounced in the company’s recent revelation that 40 million SMBs now have active Pages (2 million advertise). And BIA/Kelsey’s own survey data indicate that social is the most prevalent marketing channel.

The biggest drivers for this according to Czaja are reach and targeting. More than 1 billion people use Facebook daily, the vast majority via mobile.  As for targeting, it’s more accurate on Facebook than most other digital media he asserted. This involves lots of granular audience profiling.

“We’re talking about real people and not cookies,” he said, adding that businesses can enhance targeting by “bringing their own data onto Facebook” for retargeting. FB can also target look-alike audiences with similar characteristics to a brand’s existing customers or target audience.

The full session video is below.

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Content and intelligence drive results in social media marketing according to SOCi founder and CEO Afif Khoury. He presented findings during a segment on social media at BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL (video below). This takes form in an actionable six-step process.

Social media continues to come in proximity with localized marketing, shown most recently by Facebook’s announcement that 40 million SMBs now have active Pages. And BIA/Kelsey’s own survey data indicate that social is the most prevalent marketing channel.

But the opportunity is greater among national advertisers that are increasingly localizing campaigns. National entities are generally more adoptive than SMBs when it comes to emerging media like social. And their size makes branding (conducive to social media) critical.

The why has largely been made evident, per the above and lots of evidence in the marketplace for social’s collision with local. The remaining question is how, and that’s where we’re seeing lots of experimentation and standards development from companies like SOCi.

“Most national brands seem to think they can capture a national audience with a single page,” said Khoury. “What they’re leaving behind is the hundreds of local pages that are getting reviews, getting comments, getting activity, but there’s nobody there.”

The session clip is embedded below and stay tuned for much more conference video and highlights.

The post Conference Video: SOCi's Six Steps to Social-Local Marketing appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Wearables, smart homes and trying not to be creepy… these were the topics of a fireside chat with PwC’s Daniel Eckert. Stepping back from the day-to-day tactics of local content and ad delivery, we invited the big thinker to BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL to discuss the macro trends driving tech & media (video below).

As PwC’s Emerging Technology Group CTO, his role is to do just that — spot emerging trends and historical cycles to triangulate where under-recognized pockets of innovation and wealth will sprout. As market watchers ourselves, we love this discussion and had the chance to riff on stage with Eckert.

The video is embedded below: Part two of the series that covers the fireside chat that followed his keynote (part one is here).

The post Conference Video: PwC's Futurist-View on Local Media, Part 2 appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Despite all of the excitement around location based mobile advertising, the dirty little secret is that it’s tempered by the accuracy of the location signal… which is often wildly inaccurate.

Following our podcast with ThinNear founder and former CEO Eli Portnoy, we had the chance to catch up with Hilary Maitland at BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL last month to discuss the firm’s latest Location Score Index.

“When an app creates advertising calls, they can [report] location to however many decimals of accuracy they want,” said Maitland. “That location can come from multiple sources.So if you want to be accurate, you have to understand where that location data is coming from and is it actually where you’re stated.”

More importantly we looked at a few ThinkNear case studies of what can be expected when location is done right. There are clear performance deltas between good and bad practices. This follows our similar discussion with xAd’s Dan Hight about what some of those best practices look like.

The video is embedded below and we’ll have lots more on this topic in ongoing coverage of location-based mobile advertising.

The post Conference Video: The Importance of Accurate Location Data appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Does my mobile location say that I’m in a Target store? Or am I in the parking lot? Or in the Starbucks within the Target? Or am I driving by at 60 mph? These details matter for contextual relevance in ad targeting. But most mobile ad placements fail to differentiate.

xAd is looking to change that with its newest tool, Blueprints. It announced the product late last week, but we had previously gotten a sneak peek during an ad targeting session at BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL. I’ve embedded the highlight reel from that session below.

Blueprints builds from xAd’s “footprints” product, which has been gathering data in the marketplace for months (see our launch coverage). By tracking user spatial behavior, it’s been able to build a robust data set of user location and movement patterns.

Blueprints takes that a step further by overlaying the physical orientation of different businesses, using satellite imagery. For example, many stores (think strip malls) are set back hundreds of yards from the street, where place data usually centers.

This is the kind of thing that makes a lot of sense at, say, a car dealership. Pinpointing someone on a dealer lot has considerably different ad messaging implications than someone driving by, or waiting in the maintenance/service area of the dealership.

“How do I know someone is on a parking lot? How do I fence that?” said xAd platform head Dan Hight. “We created a way of making polygons on the fly, and we’ve hired blueprint editors as we’re calling them, to do this for the top 350 brands and the larger scale of the retail block.”

We previewed this latest announcement (including a visual demo) in an on-stage interview with Hight, along with some of the broader tactical matters of location targeting. The video is below, and stay tuned for lots more conference footage.

The post Mapping Physical Spaces for Ad Targeting: A Conversation with xAd appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Local On-Demand Economy (LODE) apps were the largest recipient of VC funding in 2014. And it makes sense given the favorable unit economics that LODE services can accomplish, along with several other metrics that VCs tend to like.

This was galvanized during our December Interactive Local Media conference, during which we interviewed two leading VCs with LODE companies in their portfolio. Michael Yang of Comcast ventures fleshed out the opportunity behind Shuddle and FlightCar, while Mucker Capital Managing Partner William Hsu did similar for BloomNation (see video below).

These are just a few of the many companies bringing LODE principles to new verticals. It’s the uberfication of local. But most of all, the investment theses of Yang and Hsu kept coming back to the fact that the age of local search is behind us. End-to-end transaction tools are compressing the supply chain and the steps of the traditional local search process.

“There’s no advertising in these apps, it’s purely a grossed-up transactional value,” Yang said on stage. “Local isn’t reviews anymore, it’s on demand… The business model is consumer pay, and the merchant is being aggregated into a network.”

In fact, we liked their analysis so much that we’ll have Yang and Hsu back at BIA/Kelsey NOW for a VC panel. To prime that discussion, we created a highlight reel of their comments from the December show. You can see it below as a sneak peek of the types of discussions we’ll have on stage in San Francisco in June.

We hope to see you there. Meanwhile, see our ongoing LODE coverage, and recently released white paper.

The post VCs: Will LODE Displace Local Search? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The age of big data is playing out in lots of ways. One of the opportune areas it’s colliding with is call monetization. Call analytics providers like Marchex are planting this flag with analytics to derive meaning — and thus ROI — from inbound phone leads.

Following a recent video post from our call analytics session at the Interactive Local Media Conference in San Francisco, below is part two. It drills down into best practices in call analytics — told by Marchex, with examples from its product set.

We’ll follow up soon with video clips from the rest of the session. Meanwhile, we’re gearing up for BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL, where we’ll cover this topic as well. The conference takes place two weeks in Dallas. Hope to see you there.*

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*email me for discount code to attend: mbolandATbiakelsey.com

The post Conference Video: Call Monetization is All About Analytics appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Following yesterday’s video post on Deseret Digital Media’s (DDM) stance on separating new media from old, it’s time now to drill down on the “how.” (video below)

As a brief recap, media companies that launch digital products under entirely new divisions can benefit from nimbleness and growth that isn’t saddled with an innovator’s dilemma. As discussed yesterday, this church & state separation happens on many levels, such as sales and product development.

For the latter, Deseret has developed products that natively make sense for mobile, rather than shoving desktop formats on a smaller screen. As we’ve seen, desktop ad formats don’t monetize as well in mobile, which has been the biggest reason I’ve observed for publisher and advertiser reticence with mobile.

So the answer — as we’ve espoused in the past — is to work with entirely new formats that not only make sense for mobile’s unique form factor, but actually utilize it’s unique variables to create higher performing ads. Those performance deltas lead to premiums, thus counteracting the monetization dilemma.

Those formats and strategies can involve things such as location targeting and calls to action to capture high-intent mobile actions (like calling a business). But as DDM’s Christopher Lee demonstrates in clear economic terms, it’s also about abandoning traditional formats — like display — altogether.

He names lots of examples of what DDM calls “mobile ready” revenue, then zeros in on native advertising such as sponsored articles. This has traditionally been snubbed in news and journalism contexts but makes more sense in the smartphone era, he argues. The 10 minute highlight reel is below.

The post Conference Video: DDM Part II: Finding "Mobile-Ready" Revenue appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.