SMBs are increasingly aware of two themes – often related – that are core to their future business growth: 1) consumers expect to discover and interact with them on mobile platforms; 2) existing customers directly impact profitability; retaining and delighting them must be given higher priority.

Huzzah, the digital arm of User-Friendly Media, is building a platform to solve both problems concurrently, and at a manageable price point. The company’s focus on mobile and loyalty is underscored by its recent study revealing that fewer than 20 percent of SMBs have a mobile app, and even fewer – 17 percent – deploy a loyalty program.

Its SMB suite starts with supplying a mobile app, surrounded by impression-based media campaigns that drive app installs and post-click activities, or secondary actions (click-to-call and click-to-schedule-appointment, for example).

Why a mobile app rather than an optimized or responsive mobile website/landing page? Huzzah VP of Product Development Lance Brown says it’s not a case of either/or; SMBs should optimize their mobile presence in all environments. But building apps for SMBs allows them to “do many of the things that big brands do.”

A digital loyalty platform is a distinct, but related, part of the Huzzah solution. It’s a “networked” loyalty model , with a consumer-facing app that aggregates participating merchants (though rewards are not transferable across distinct merchants).

Each SMB is outfitted with an “out of the box solution,” according to Brown, that includes an iPad storefront, loyalty cards, digital coaching and unlimited rewards (Huzzah uses “coins” as its rewards currency). Currently check-ins are the predominant activity that SMBs can reward, though VP of Marketing Greg Garrick notes that much more flexibility is on the horizon. “We’re building a system to offer as many types of rewards as you can think of.”

Huzzah is currently offering a promotion – a $1 trial for six months – to build a critical mass on merchants on its loyalty platform, which strengthens the consumer-facing product while enabling the company to upsell/cross-sell SMBs into its additional marketing products.

The post Huzzah’s SMB Success Formula: Mobile + Loyalty appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

SMBs are increasingly aware of two themes – often related – that are core to their future business growth: 1) consumers expect to discover and interact with them on mobile platforms; 2) existing customers directly impact profitability; retaining and delighting them must be given higher priority.

Huzzah, the digital arm of User-Friendly Media, is building a platform to solve both problems concurrently, and at a manageable price point. The company’s focus on mobile and loyalty is underscored by its recent study revealing that fewer than 20 percent of SMBs have a mobile app, and even fewer – 17 percent – deploy a loyalty program.

Its SMB suite starts with supplying a mobile app, surrounded by impression-based media campaigns that drive app installs and post-click activities, or secondary actions (click-to-call and click-to-schedule-appointment, for example).

Why a mobile app rather than an optimized or responsive mobile website/landing page? Huzzah VP of Product Development Lance Brown says it’s not a case of either/or; SMBs should optimize their mobile presence in all environments. But building apps for SMBs allows them to “do many of the things that big brands do.”

A digital loyalty platform is a distinct, but related, part of the Huzzah solution. It’s a “networked” loyalty model , with a consumer-facing app that aggregates participating merchants (though rewards are not transferable across distinct merchants).

Each SMB is outfitted with an “out of the box solution,” according to Brown, that includes an iPad storefront, loyalty cards, digital coaching and unlimited rewards (Huzzah uses “coins” as its rewards currency). Currently check-ins are the predominant activity that SMBs can reward, though VP of Marketing Greg Garrick notes that much more flexibility is on the horizon. “We’re building a system to offer as many types of rewards as you can think of.”

Huzzah is currently offering a promotion – a $1 trial for six months – to build a critical mass on merchants on its loyalty platform, which strengthens the consumer-facing product while enabling the company to upsell/cross-sell SMBs into its additional marketing products.

The post Huzzah's SMB Success Formula: Mobile + Loyalty appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

BIA/Kelsey, forecasting $52.9 Billion in national local spending by 2017, has unveiled its new Leading in Local: The National Impact conference, which will take place in Atlanta May 7-9.

The 2.5 Day event is expected to be the largest gathering of national brands and local marketing players that has ever taken place. Brands, franchises, multi-location stores and others will be the focus.

We’re ready with national local’s top leaders, including Weather Company Global Revenue Officer Curt Hecht; Gannett/G/O Digital SVP Mark Marinacci; Foursquare VP of Sales Rob Wilks; Living Social SVP Mitch Spolan; AutoTrader Founder Chip Perry; YP EVP & GM of Digital Markets David Lebow; ReachLocal SVP John Gould; Yodle VP Corey O’Donnell; MediaVest EVP Maribeth Papuga; and many other leading innovators.

A number of speakers will be accompanied by top brands they are working with. The list already includes marketing leaders at brands such as Scion, Two Men and a Truck, Genghis Grill, and PostNet. BIA/Kelsey is also holding The GOLOCAL Awards for brands, which will include an on stage presentation.

This isn’t your typical “local” event. It’s all new, it’s all important. And it’s all here. Register.

The post ‘National Brands, Local Marketing': BIA/Kelsey’s Spring Event is May 7-9 in Atlanta appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

BIA/Kelsey, forecasting $52.9 Billion in national local spending by 2017, has unveiled its new Leading in Local: The National Impact conference, which will take place in Atlanta May 7-9.

The 2.5 Day event is expected to be the largest gathering of national brands and local marketing players that has ever taken place. Brands, franchises, multi-location stores and others will be the focus.

We’re ready with national local’s top leaders, including Weather Company Global Revenue Officer Curt Hecht; Gannett/G/O Digital SVP Mark Marinacci; Foursquare VP of Sales Rob Wilks; Living Social SVP Mitch Spolan; AutoTrader Founder Chip Perry; YP EVP & GM of Digital Markets David Lebow; ReachLocal SVP John Gould; Yodle VP Corey O’Donnell; MediaVest EVP Maribeth Papuga; and many other leading innovators.

A number of speakers will be accompanied by top brands they are working with. The list already includes marketing leaders at brands such as Scion, Two Men and a Truck, Genghis Grill, and PostNet. BIA/Kelsey is also holding The GOLOCAL Awards for brands, which will include an on stage presentation.

This isn’t your typical “local” event. It’s all new, it’s all important. And it’s all here. Register.

The post 'National Brands, Local Marketing': BIA/Kelsey's Spring Event is May 7-9 in Atlanta appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The local search market will expand from $6.0 billion to $8.6 billion during this five-year period, accelerating at a faster pace than the aggregate U.S. search market. Mobile-local search is a critical growth driver as users leverage their devices to make local decisions, and geo-targeted messages surface against these queries. Desktop search volume continues to rise as well, though, largely a product of rising tablet adoption and surging vertical search on specialized, category-specific sites (auto, jobs, etc.).

Local display, which includes social media advertising, remains smaller than search. However, the sector is growing more quickly, from $2.9 billion to $5.7 billion during the five-year curve. The primary growth drivers are social and video display, both of which are seeing expanded inventory and improving CPM rates.

BIA/Kelsey clients can log in to download the full report.

The post Local Online/Interactive Advertising Revenues to Approach $18 Billion by 2017 appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Facebook investor and press events have become spectacles unto themselves, where distilling signal from noise is a tricky task. But that’s what we’ll flesh out here in the aftermath of the company’s first earnings call post-IPO…a call that featured an appearance from Mark Zuckerberg, nothing overly substantive from Facebook execs and persistent questions about the health of its ads and payment businesses in the mobile environment.

First off, here are the big numbers:

– Revenue for Q2 2012 was $1.18 billion, up 32 percent year-over-year. Unlike the prior quarter, there was no sequential decline in sales. Nearly 84 percent of the pie came from ads (the rest from payments), a consistent breakout with the 85/15 split we first saw in the S-1 filing. ARPU rose to $3.20, level with where it stood at the end of 2011.

– Overall mobile usage (not broken out by geography) is still surging, with Facebook adding 55 million monthly active users (MAUs) in Q2. Desktop usage climbed to 955 million, but the U.S. daily and monthly actives are virtually flat, underscoring the network’s need to more effectively monetize its burgeoning international presence, especially in emerging economies beyond Europe. Facebook’s ARPU in Asia was $0.55, and only $0.44 in the rest of the world. Granted, this is up from $0.37, but still legs well behind the U.S. and Europe. And, as has been documented, many younger economies are heavily dependent on mobile devices.

– Now, let’s unpack the advertising business. As we’ve suggested for many months, Facebook is placing huge bets on its Sponsored Stories ad unit, which leverages organic news feed content by amplifying it into socially-enabled ad units. It’s the unit that is now inserted into desktop and mobile newsfeeds. COO Sheryl Sandberg shared both quantitative and qualitative morsels of progress: $1 million daily run rate for Sponsored Stories, with half occurring on mobile, where Facebook only recently began selling ads separately from  desktop and fully integrating them into newsfeeds.

So, basic numbers and corporate boilerplate aside, what did we learn about the company’s progress, or lack thereof?

First, it’s beginning to materially monetize mobile, something it couldn’t say in its S-1 or even on IPO day. Granted, for a network of nearly 550 million mobile MAUs, $500K per day does not a robust advertising business make, but it’s progress nonetheless. Moreover, various studies from independent ad agencies anecdotally suggest that mobile Sponsored Stories drive engagement at a multiple of desktop. Then again, they have to because of the inescapable real estate and inventory constraints of the form factor.

Now, the inevitable mobile dilemma: if Sponsored Stories in the newsfeed show early signs of working, yet space is limited, will Facebook ramp up the number of ads it presents? This is the catch-22 tension that exists across the network, but it’s more pronounced on mobile because of the size, and the fact that all ads are “native” newsfeed units that propose to act like organic content.

Sandberg suggested that it will soon throttle up the numbers of Sponsored Stories appearing in the desktop newsfeed. Will mobile follow suit? Will it have to? This is the fundamentally risky yet financially promising pretzel that Facebook must wrestle with. If it opts to push the envelope, it may need to unlock new forms of targeting to optimize relevance, such as its recent experiment that leverages Facebook Connect to target mobile users with ads based on their prior app usage.

Sequentially, the payments revenue stream was almost flat, growing 3 percent from Q1. This isn’t surprising considering that social gaming usage is swiftly shifting to mobile, where Facebook is yet to unveil payments. Meanwhile, only in recent months did the company introduce its app store for desktop and mobile and open up its payments platform beyond Credits to support other developers’ currencies.

Finally, Sandberg opined on the local opportunity: “It’s the holy grail of the Internet,” asserting that Facebook is uniquely positioned to capitalize because of the 7 million businesses that market from their Pages each month. We’ll see what shape their local strategy takes, as Facebook has had some false starts with SMBs (its short-lived deals platform) and hasn’t shown much propensity to ramp up a field sales force to control small merchant relationships directly.

The post The Morning After…What We Really Learned from Facebook’s Earnings Call appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

In the run-up to Facebook’s ballyhooed IPO, BIA/Kelsey has released Wave III of its U.S. Social Media Advertising Forecast, which reveals overall market acceleration in 2012 and 2013, and steady growth in locally targeted social spend.

From 2011 to 2016, U.S. social ad revenues will climb from $3.8 billion to $9.8 billion (21 percent CAGR). Several drivers will spur this growth: increased market awareness and adoption, improvement in ad unit performance, and greater penetration of dynamic formats such as video (with YouTube as the leader).

The social advertising forecast distinguishes display (Facebook, LinkedIn) from non-display (Twitter’s “promoted” products). However, the emergence of “native” advertising formats — Facebook’s Sponsored Stories appearing directly in newsfeeds, as just one example — creates new definitional challenges in display, and online/interactive as a whole.

Local social ad spend will pace with the methodical growth of the larger geotargeted display market, rising from $840 million in 2011 to $3.1 billion in 2016 (29.8 percent CAGR). This would account for 8 percent of the local online/interactive market at the end of the five-year range.

Social Local Media clients can access the full report here, which includes analysis of the key forecast drivers and examination of trends that could shape the market in future waves.

The post Social Advertising Revenues Rise in Latest BIA/Kelsey Forecast appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

By now, there isn’t a single page of Facebook’s S-1 filing that hasn’t been exhaustively picked through and dissected in advance of the social network’s spring IPO. But what about the metrics that were underreported or unreported altogether? Moreover, which metrics really matter as a gauge of the current health of Facebook’s business and its future prospects for expanding its model?

That’s where BIA/Kelsey plants its flag in its latest Social Local Media Advisory, analyzing essential stats such as ARPU (average revenue per user), juxtaposing the network’s seemingly pleateauing audience against its mobile greenfield, and projecting where and how Facebook’s business iterates moving forward.

We explore several conceivable (and even likely) revenue engines, evaluating Facebook’s potential approach to each and their odds of both occurring and succeeding. These include (but aren’t limited to):

– Facebook ad network (desktop & mobile)

– Expansion of Credits beyond gaming

– “Action Ads Targeting” through the new Open Graph

– Platform monetization (through both developers and brands)

– Mobile monetization strategy and ad formats

– Acquisition approach and targets

Our core focus remains local, where Facebook’s strategy to date has been uneven, and its results mixed. While its aggregated social Deals program was short-lived, and it has never shown a propensity to build a massive sales force to penetrate local markets, Facebook has now opened its Ads API to enable more partners to manage and optimize scaled campaigns. This has application for agencies, media, resellers and other groups serving SMB audiences that can now consider adding Facebook Ads to their digital portfolio.

SLM clients can access the full report here.

The post New SLM Report: ‘Facebook’s Historic IPO — BIA/Kelsey’s Take’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

By now, much of the connected universe, and certainly all of technolphilia, is aware of Facebook’s IPO, which seeks to raise up to $5 billion (and perhaps eventually $10 billion) when its shares go public this spring. The net effect is a valuation of $75 billion to $100 billion for the 8-year-old social network.

Mining the 150-page S-1 for gold can be something of a scavenger hunt. Of course, Facebook’s user reach and engagement metrics explode off the document: 845 million monthly active users (MAUs) as of December 2011, 483 million daily active users (DAUs), 425 million mobile MAUs (as detailed by MLM’s Mike Boland), 2.7 billion likes and comments per day, and the list goes on. Facebook’s engagement stats — and the data that those enable it to collect about its audience and on behalf of its advertisers — is the envy of companies everywhere.

Also, its $1 billion in net income was a conveniently round and easily discoverable number. But probing deeper, the data told other narratives as well: some promising, others alarming and several yet to be determined.

The Good

Facebook’s top-line revenues continue to grow, as one would expect with a maturing network whose domestic and global reach is ubiquitous. Revenues eclipsed $3.7 billion in 2011, an 88 percent increase year over year. Advertising jumped 69 percent from 2010, with 56 percent of that U.S.-based. Perhaps more encouraging was its deepening payments business, which now accounts for 15 percent of Facebook’s total revenues, skyrocketing from $106 million to $557 million in just 12 months.

Facebook also already boasts $3.8 billion in cash on hand, and that number is about to multiply.

The Bad

Although $3.7 billion in revenues seems like a handsome haul, the top-line number actually came in lighter than many analysts expected. The 69 percent increase in ad revenues looks modest when noted that this stream boomed by 145 percent from 2009 to 2010. And that was even as Facebook boosted its total ads delivered by 42 percent and average price per ad by 18 percent.

Meanwhile, it is not realizing meaningful money from its 425 million mobile users. Facebook is in the strange position of both attacking and defending on mobile platforms. While it continues to enhance its apps suite and build new mobile products, and will soon place Sponsored Stories ads within mobile news feeds, it also wants to refrain from cannibalizing the ads business it has amassed on the desktop. As a result, substitutive mobile growth is listed as a risk factor.

The (Unknown) Future

Facebook’s future appears as uncertain as it is promising (and vice versa). Naturally the company must continually calibrate its monetization engine, and quickly unpack new revenue sources (as it has with Facebook Credits over the past two years). Here are three domains that we feel Facebook may address with its newfound cash and investor pressure:

– Ad Network: Facebook’s reach is undeniable. Its user data trove is deep, perhaps unparalleled. And thousands of third-party sites have linked to Facebook’s platform through Connect, a single sign-on conduit that can socialize a website experience based on the user’s Facebook social graph. Mash it all together, and an ad network — both desktop and mobile — seems irresistible and inevitable. For now, we’ll call it “Facebook AdSense.”

– Payments Expansion: Facebook has already ported its Credits currency beyond gaming and virtual goods to digital products such as movies and music. Now, will the network usher Credits into real-world goods and services, making it a full-service social commerce portal? It toyed with the idea during its short-lived deals trial last summer, in which Credits were a payment option (though not the only one). Expect many experiments to come.

– Local: Facebook has never shown the propensity to build a sales force of the mass and scope necessary to exhaustively address local markets and SMBs (as opposed to say Groupon). Even its deals play was an aggregated approach through partners. However, it does collect much of its advertising revenues from small and mid-market businesses that self-serve on the platform. Now it has opened up its Ads API to all qualified developers, enabling more partners with local audiences (agencies, media, etc.) to manage scaled ads campaigns on behalf of a fleet of clients. As just one example, French directory publisher PagesJaunes recently joined the API program.

A more enterprising probe of the S-1 will publish to Social Local Media clients in the coming days.

The post Facebook’s Long-Awaited IPO: The Good, the Bad and the (Local?) Future appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The local display ad companyPaperG today unveiled a deal with AOL to offer its local display advertising technology via Patch, AOL’s hyperlocal platform.

The PaperG solution offers the ability to create a locally targeted display ad with only the businesses name and address as a starting point. PaperG then crawls and aggregates the content necessary to build an ad. This is an attractive proposition for an operation like Patch, which has hundreds of hyperlocal sites in U.S. suburban communities, providing news and community content.

PaperG has formed multiple relationships with local media properties looking for simple local online advertising products for their customers.

Some of PaperG’s existing media partners are the Los Angeles Times, MediaNews Group, Lee Enterprises, Sun-Times Media Group, Hearst, McClatchy, Gannett, New York Times Regional, Boston Globe, Newsday and New York Post.

The post PaperG Teams Up With AOL’s Patch appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.