National brands are increasingly seeing how changes in mobile technology, particularly the ability to combine location awareness with predictive analytics, will completely transform advertising. This is the message Dan Eckert, Managing Director, Emerging Technologies, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, will deliver in his keynote address on Day 3 of BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL conference, March 25-27, in Dallas.

“There is this new technology that is becoming enabled because of the mobile device that is really disrupting advertising,” Eckert said. “Some people call it geo-location. But really it’s the combination of that device being a sensor and a collection of passive data that knows a ton about you.”

We asked Dan to join us on a Google Hangout to give a preview of his talk at NATIONAL. The video below offer an excerpt of that conversation. If you are interested in attending the NATIONAL event, email me to receive a promotional code that offers the best rate available (claughlin AT biakelsey.com).

The post BIA/Kelsey’s NATIONAL Preview: Dan Eckert on the Future of Mobile appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

National brands are increasingly seeing how changes in mobile technology, particularly the ability to combine location awareness with predictive analytics, will completely transform advertising. This is the message Dan Eckert, Managing Director, Emerging Technologies, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, will deliver in his keynote address on Day 3 of BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL conference, March 25-27, in Dallas.

“There is this new technology that is becoming enabled because of the mobile device that is really disrupting advertising,” Eckert said. “Some people call it geo-location. But really it’s the combination of that device being a sensor and a collection of passive data that knows a ton about you.”

We asked Dan to join us on a Google Hangout to give a preview of his talk at NATIONAL. The video below offer an excerpt of that conversation. If you are interested in attending the NATIONAL event, email me to receive a promotional code that offers the best rate available (claughlin AT biakelsey.com).

The post BIA/Kelsey's NATIONAL Preview: Dan Eckert on the Future of Mobile appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

We continue to gear up for our National Conference, taking place next month in Dallas. It will be here before we know it. As we put together the program, many themes are emerging.

One theme is the importance of national brand advertisers in the local media picture. The connotation with “local” is always SMB; but national advertisers are driving lots of the ad spending. In fact, national companies make up 36 percent of the $140 billion spent on location targeted advertising in the U.S.

And thought they’re national in scope, many large brands — especially multi-location and franchised businesses — compete for consumers and mindshare at the local level, where conversions actually happen.  This has driven their early adoption of emerging areas like location based mobile advertising.

We discuss a few of these themes in the video below, and preview the location based mobile ad session. We hope this piques your interest and we’ll have more previews to come. Email me for a discount code if that helps your ability to join us in Dallas (mbolandATbiakelsey.com). Hope to see you there.

The post Video Preview: BIA/Kelsey’s National Conference, the Mobile Angle appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

We continue to gear up for our National Conference, taking place next month in Dallas. It will be here before we know it. As we put together the program, many themes are emerging.

One theme is the importance of national brand advertisers in the local media picture. The connotation with “local” is always SMB; but national advertisers are driving lots of the ad spending. In fact, national companies make up 36 percent of the $140 billion spent on location targeted advertising in the U.S.

And thought they’re national in scope, many large brands — especially multi-location and franchised businesses — compete for consumers and mindshare at the local level, where conversions actually happen.  This has driven their early adoption of emerging areas like location based mobile advertising.

We discuss a few of these themes in the video below, and preview the location based mobile ad session. We hope this piques your interest and we’ll have more previews to come. Email me for a discount code if that helps your ability to join us in Dallas (mbolandATbiakelsey.com). Hope to see you there.

The post Video Preview: BIA/Kelsey's National Conference, the Mobile Angle appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

It’s here! We have just announced the agenda for BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL. which takes place March 25-27 in Dallas.

The NATIONAL theme is especially important this year. Local technology and services have reached a level where they have fostered major relationships with national brands and retailers. At IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting last year, we noted a poll by Operative that showed that local sales has now become the seventh most important revenue driver for CMOs. Our own BIA/Kelsey research shows that national players will spend more than $68 billion on local marketing by 2018.

We know this: Brands want to be part of this. Retailers want to be part of this. Franchisees want to be part of this. And so does local’s growing community of digital channel players and vendors.

All of them will be front and center at the third edition of BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL, which we are co-chairing with 3rd Act Marketing’s Gregg Stewart (ex 15 Miles, TMP and Wahlstrom).

The agenda is now posted, with an initial slate of keynoters that includes Facebook’s Jon Czaja, whose portfolio includes the national franchise opportunity, where he leverages his experience at core national local leaders such as General Mills, eBay and Walmart; “Everything I Know about Marketing I Learned from Google” author Aaron Goldman, Kenshoo‘s CMO, who shares his irreverent and critical take on search. social and mobile; and Geary LSF President and CEO Karen Kovaleski, who is spearheading national local strategies for such key brands as Bumble Bee, WD-40, Brooks Brothers and Ashley Furniture.

The brands themselves will be well represented at the show. The initial slate of brands at the event include key local targeting leaders from Brooks Brothers, El Pollo Loco, All My Sons Moving and Storage, ServiceMaster/American Home Shield and Rooms to Go.

Other speakers come from media leaders who are providing local solutions to national players, including Dallas Morning News SVP Grant Moise and Washington Post VP Ethan Selzer.

We’ll also hear from a number of top platform providers and agencies, including BizHive Chairman Dave Walker, ReachLocal VP Travis Arthur, Where2GetIt CEO Manish Patel, Simpli.fi CEO Frost Prioleau, SpeakEasy CEO Mike Orren, LocalBizNow CEO Todd Webber and Soci CEO Afif Khoury.

Anchoring the whole show is the second edition of our GoLocal Awards, honoring the best efforts from national brands and rretailers(and their agencies) in local. We’re just getting started. Watch this space for frequent updates.

The post Mark Your Calendars: BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL, March 25-27, Dallas appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

In local media and advertising, “National” is increasingly where it’s at. Though paradoxical in a semantic sense, it stands to reason if you consider the deeper pockets and more technologically adaptive nature of national brands, compared to SMBs.

This is especially true for multi-location businesses such as chain restaurants or retail. Though they’re national in scale, they compete at the local level where conversions happen. We’ve reported that national brand spending will represent 43 percent of location based advertising by 2018.

This involves an evolving set of campaign components including mobile, social, search, listings management, etc.. These strategies are are endemic to local marketing but take unique forms for the nuances of multi-location businesses and how they’re oriented.

We’ve covered this “National” area of local marketing for years but began to formalize that coverage last year. Now we’re blitzing the topic even more, with the upcoming National conference in March in Dallas. And today’s white paper is the latest.

The report’s executive summary is below and BIA/Kelsey clients can read the entire thing by logging into the client portal. Anyone else interested in the full report, please email me (mbolandATbiakelsey.com).

Executive Summary

Smart phones now account for 75 percent of mobile subscriptions according to BIA/Kelsey. Stemming from their evolving capabilities (i.e. location awareness, connectivity, optics), location targeted mobile advertising continues its rapid ascent. BIA/Kelsey projects it to reach $19 billion in the U.S. this year.

Google supports these findings, reporting that 80 percent of smartphone owners search for local information, and 80 percent of those users want ads customized to their locale. Moreover, 73 percent of mobile searches result in conversions (such as calling a business). Half of those happen within one hour.

BIA/Kelsey forecast data and insights likewise indicate that mobile users are “high intent” customers who often have a sense of immediacy (read: ready to buy). Correspondingly, mobile ad networks confirm performance deltas — such as higher click through rates and phone calls — for location targeted ads.

But the emergence of mobile has also made advertising more complex as the technology and consumer behavior evolve. For example, advertisers’ affinity for proof of ROI and attribution is technically difficult when consumer decision-making happens across several devices including desktop, tablet and mobile.

This challenge is amplified for national companies that must align brand messages with local presence. Those localized entities include retail partners, franchisees, distributors, and affiliates. This makes it difficult to achieve consistent messaging and service levels across geographically disparate entities.

These challenges are highlighted by the size of the market opportunity: National brand spending will represent 43 percent of location based advertising by 2018 according to BIA/Kelsey. That’s about $68 billion — an amount that makes multi-location marketing strategies increasingly critical.

Some of the areas where these strategies will focus include social media, listings management, ratings and reviews, search engine optimization, and of course, mobile. This report examines each of these areas and their impact on multi-location advertising in the mobile age.

The post Multi-Location Advertising in the Mobile Age: A New BIA/Kelsey Insight Paper appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The rhetoric in local media has changed dramatically in the past five years, particularly as mobile and big data collide. Part of that is to take the analytics we’ve grown to love on the desktop and bring them to the offline world (where most commerce happens).

Many of the local data and mobile ad attribution players we’ve been covering are leading this charge. It’s all about tracking offline behavior through myriad mobile device signals in order to determine ad attribution, or build predictive models for future behavior.

xAd is one of those players; in the recent launch of its “footprints” analytics products, it likened location data as “a new kind of digital cookie”. This clever way of characterizing location is catching on; it was also stated at our May Atlanta conference.

In my interview with the Location Based Marketing Association president Asif Kahn, we unpack this term he previously coined. That and other key topics in local (fate of Foursquare/Swarm) are included in the full video below.

Navigate the 15 minute interview through the chapter links above the video, and stay tuned for more conference video on a weekly basis. We’l continue to post as we gear up for our next show: SMB Digital Marketing in New Orleans in September.

Video Chapter Links

Is location the new cookie?
Is “indoors” where the future of location based marketing resides?
Is Facebook a sleeping giant in location based marketing?

The post Conference Video: Location is the "New Cookie" appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The rhetoric in local media has changed dramatically in the past five years, particularly as mobile and big data collide. Part of that is to take the analytics we’ve grown to love on the desktop and bring them to the offline world (where most commerce happens).

Many of the local data and mobile ad attribution players we’ve been covering are leading this charge. It’s all about tracking offline behavior through myriad mobile device signals in order to determine ad attribution, or build predictive models for future behavior.

xAd is one of those players; in the recent launch of its “footprints” analytics products, it likened location data as “a new kind of digital cookie”. This clever way of characterizing location is catching on; it was also stated at our May Atlanta conference.

In my interview with the Location Based Marketing Association president Asif Kahn, we unpack this term he previously coined. That and other key topics in local (fate of Foursquare/Swarm) are included in the full video below.

Navigate the 15 minute interview through the chapter links above the video, and stay tuned for more conference video on a weekly basis. We’l continue to post as we gear up for our next show: SMB Digital Marketing in New Orleans in September.

Video Chapter Links

Is location the new cookie?
Is “indoors” where the future of location based marketing resides?
Is Facebook a sleeping giant in location based marketing?

The post Conference Video: Location is the “New Cookie” appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

As Instagram finds ways to monetize and expand internationally, some smart players in the local media space are already learning how to use it as a marketing and “presence” tool for SMBs. We discussed with MomentFeed and Ghengis Grill in this week’s conference video (embed below).

Instagram’s use by SMBs is something we’ve covered since our September conference with Perry Evans at Closely. It’s in fact the social sharing product that is showing the most user activity on Closely’s Perch platform. This plays out as users capture and share local moments via filter-laden photos.

This has become particularly fitting to the hipster-ific foodie set, which means an opportunity for restaurants. The question is how can restaurant owners (or other verticals) capture the Instagram action happening around their businesses. The answer is the Perch’s and MomentFeed’s of the world.

The post Leading in Local Video: Is Instagram the Next Big Local Marketing Play? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

One of the themes that emerged from BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local conference in Atlanta earlier this month was the importance of location targeted ad strategies for national brands. That theme culminated in a mega session on Day 2 of the conference on location targeting strategies.

We set it up as a series of case studies that took the stage one by one. There was lots of diversity in the companies, campaign objectives and takeaways. This was emblematic of another key theme of the conference: there’s a great deal of variability in ad tactics from one brand to the next.

That’s always been the case in local, given the fragmentation of SMBs, all those categories and “headings”. Each has different needs. We learned in Atlanta that while it’s not as pronounced for national “multi-location” businesses, they are still quite diverse in their marketing dynamics.

We’ll be mining and posting short videos on these themes in the days and weeks to come. To kick off the series, here’s my intro to the mobile & location forum. It covers a few key trends to set the stage for the next speakers; or in this case the next videos to come.  Stay tuned for that.

The post Leading in Local Video: Mobile & Location Based Ad Targeting Trends appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.