AppLovin will launch its Adaptive Personalization Platform (APP) after two and a half years of development, we learned yesterday from CEO Adam Foroughi. APP will help brands better serve personalized recommendations on mobile devices and re-target mobile ads.

Key features of the platform are to:

—Learn an individual’s shopping behavior and predict what he or she will be interested in next, creating tailored recommendations.

—Remind customers of items they may have left in a (virtual) shopping cart, and suggest related products or offers.

—Allow marketers to measure effectiveness of personal recommendations by attributing influence and conversions across screens, so they can spend where their users are located.

APP ingest insights from each customer’s shopping behavior across screens and retarget ads accordingly, including location targeting.

These ads will merge with the user experience and show contextually relevant information. AppLovin currently targets U.S. brands as clients but plans to expand its client base to SMBs in the future.

Foroughi released these key findings from product testing:

— APP increased conversion rates from 2 percent to 10 percent.

— Advertisers see ROI from APP within in 2 week .

— APP can reach 70 percent of an advertiser’s audience within 72 hours.

— For every $1 spent, advertisers see$20 in return.

AppLovin’s success can be measured by the growth rate in consumers’ time with mobile.

“Consumption of media is high but transaction behavior is not high yet. And there lies AppLovin’s opportunity,” said Foroughi, who believes the web’s evolution will repeat itself in the mobile web. AppLovin is positioned to help brands better manage mobile consumer transactions.

“By delivering personalized recommendations on mobile to a billion consumers each month, we’ve cracked the code; beta response has been incredible among tops brands across retail, travel and hospitality,” said Foroughi. “We’re excited to officially turn the platform on to give this same opportunity to any advertiser looking to dramatically boost their mobile revenues.”

AppLovin also plans to bring these solutions to social networks. The company could be on the cusp of a promising future given accelerated growth in mobile, where consumer behavior is becoming more and more transactional.

The post Capitalizing on the Growth of Mobile: A conversation with AppLovin appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Here’s what we’ve been waiting to announce: Google Offers’ head Nitin Mangtani will join our great list of keynoters at ILM East March 26-28 in Boston. We believe Mangtani’s appearance marks one of the first public debuts of Google Offers, which is playing a major role in Google’s vital local strategy, along with Google Places, Google Maps and Zagat ratings and reviews.

Previously announced ILM East keynoters include Groupon Vice Chair +++ Ted Leonsis; American Express SVP of Social Media Leslie Berland; CityGrid Media CEO Jay Herratti; New York Times Research Ops VP Michael Zimbalist; and New York Magazine Digital GM Michael Silberman.

Mangtani joins Google Channel Sales BizDev Head Christine Merritt at ILM East. Merritt will provide Google’s perspective on its emergence in the local ecosystem, and the most effective way to work with Google as a partner.

The next wave of Deals is, in general, a key focus for us at ILM East, along with mobile local media, social local media, video local media, hyperlocal and locally targeted national advertising.

In addition to the keynotes from Google Offers and Groupon, we have a special Day 1 session dedicated to the next wave of deals, featuring EverSave’s Jere Doyle; Find n Save’s Christopher Tippie; Closely’s Perry Evans; and Boomtime’s Bill Bice. That session will be followed by a broader view of deals and ecommerce, which featured NextJump’s Charlie Kim; Cartera’s Jim Douglass; and Bundle.com’s Jaidev Shergill.

Other recent adds to the program include The Boston Globe’s Lisa DeSisto, who joins Boston.com VP of Digital Products Jeff Moriarty as a presenter; and MIT Sloan Associate Professor Catherine Tucker, who gives the low down on the effectiveness of local social media.

Before the show, we’re making a special trip to The Boston Globe’s R&D Lab (Limited Space, RSVP required). Or come to Andrew Shotland’s SEO for the Enterprise session, which also features SEO Expert Will Scott and Advance Digital Media VP John Denny. We’re looking forward to a great show.

Venture Capital
•David Hornik, Principal, August Capital
•Scott Maxwell, Senior Managing Director, OpenView

Mobile Local Media
• Walt Doyle, CEO, Where
• Doug McDonald, Director, dotMobi
• John Valentine, VP, East Coast, SCVNGR/LevelUp

Hyperlocal
• Merrill Brown, Principal, MMB Media
• Josh Fenton, CEO, GoLocal24
• Zohar Yardeni, CEO, Main Street Connect

Social Local Media
• Geoff Cramer, CEO, Social Made Simple
• Adam Japko, President, Digital Sherpa
• Jeff Moriarty, VP, Digital Products, Boston.com
• Mark Schmulen, GM, Social Media, Constant Contact

Video
• Juan Delgado, Managing Director, Americas, Perform
• John McIntyre, CEO, Pixelfish
• Randa Minkarah, SVP, Revenue, Fisher Communications

Deals and Promotional Ecosystem
• Bill Bice, CEO, BoomTime
• Jere Doyle, President and CEO, EverSave
• Perry Evans, CEO, Closely
• Christopher Tippie, CEO, FindNSave

Transactions
• Charlie Kim, CEO, NextJump
• Jim Douglass, EVP, Retail Advertising, Cartera Commerce
• Jaidev Shergill, CEO, Bundle

National/Brands
•Adam Epstein, President, AdMarketplace
•Pete Gombert,CEO, Balihoo
• Steve Sherfy, Local & Mobile Search, GroupMSearch
• Karl Siebrecht, President and CEO, AdReady

Elections 2012
• Andy Slater, VP, Digital Agency Sales, Katz 360

SMB Marketing
• Dave Galvan, President, Schedulicity
• Maria Kermath, Director, AT&T Ad Solutions
• Randy Parker, President, SMBApps
• Darren Waddell, EVP, Reply.com

Sign up now (and hint: reserve your room earlier rather than later).

The post Google Offers’ Nitin Mangtani Set to Keynote at ILM East appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

For newspaper publishers and newspaper readers, iPad apps tend to be nice to have but not especially important. Given the choice of rich newspaper apps like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, I actually opt for the browser versions over the apps: I can see a lot more at once, they’re updated more often, and they load faster.

But I’ve found that newspaper apps for “lite” newspapers are much better. USA Today’s headline and short story format is perfect for the iPad. The Washington Post (not such a lite paper) has a great iPad app, too.

In early December, The San Diego Union-Tribune — a truly lite newspaper but with good local news and features — also launched an iPad app. The result is vastly superior to the print and browser version of the newspaper. More than 11,000 downloads have already taken place.

The U-T’s iPad launch coincides with the elevation of digital chief Mike Hodges to president and COO, and today, a rebranding of the newspaper company, which recently changed hands, to U-T San Diego. The new name also does away with the dated “Sign On San Diego” city guide moniker.

An announcement on the company’s website notes that “We will now use one company name and logo on all of our media products and communications: U-T San Diego. This change marks a new era in our company’s history. It will help us unify our print and digital products under a single brand with a clear and consistent expectation of quality. SignOnSanDiego.com is now UTSanDiego.com, to match the nameplate of the newspaper and our newly released iPad app.”

Hodges, a digital real estate marketing vet prior to joining Freedom Communications and then The U-T, has been responsible for several new revenue initiatives. These include a heavy emphasis on the local daily deal, bolstered by the acquisition of Discover SD, an events guide and deals platform for a younger demographic.

Hodges notes that the iPad app was specifically designed to have an entertainment orientation. “The primary time that people are looking at it is after 6 p.m., when people want to lean back after dinner and watch TV. They’re often reading the app as well,” he says.

The app, designed by MindGruve Interactive, is geo-enabled for traffic and Surfline surf reports. It features a FlipBoard-like news page, along with dropdown “sections” for easy access. The sections include a full graphic on the Daily Deal — it shows up very well. It also prominently highlights features that were obscured in print and on the website, including arts, photos and videos.

Notably, in an effort to keep it simple, The U-T App doesn’t offer newspaper content such as comics, a television programming guide, letters to the editor, user-generated content or local news — although Hodges says a major local initiative will launch in early January. Other Phase 2 items will include more in-depth, iPad-only content. It might also include more localized weather (the temperature in the San Diego region varies by as much as 15 degrees from one area to the next).

Much has been made of the iPad’s appeal for advertisers. The charter advertiser for The U-T’s free phase is Cadillac. When the app goes to a premium model next quarter after an introductory period, sponsorship will be available for multiple sponsors on a premium basis.

Pricing for the app, however, is still being finalized. When it is introduced during Q1, there is likely to be an a la carte three month subscription for users who just want the app, especially those outside the San Diego area. My guess is it might be priced in the neighborhood of $5 a month. But there will also be bundles for people who want seven-day delivery or three-day weekend delivery.

We’ll see whether The U-T pulls the trigger on a firewall for the app. Several other publishers have announced plans to charge but haven’t done so.

The post Via iPad App, the Reintroduction of U-T San Diego (The San Diego Union-Tribune) appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Whenever one writes about the future of newspapers and other news organizations, a voice in the back of his or her head says: “They’ve tried that already and it didn’t work.” Fifteen years into the digital revolution, that’s the dilemma confronting the news industry as it once again revisits possible solutions. Thankfully, no one is giving up.

Paywalls. Video. Search. Hyperlocal. Mobile. All these things are extensively discussed in “The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism,” a new Columbia Journalism School report from Bill Grueskin, Ava Seave and Lucas Graves. The news-centric report doesn’t deal very much with our favorite subject — the transformation of the local marketplace, and the newspapers’ potential role in it. But there is plenty on the plate here.

While there are no ready answers — if we knew the answers, we would have provided them a long time ago — there are strong overviews on each subject. The real focus here is reconnecting to the real “fans” and “regulars” who may engage with a news product 50 times more than the “occasionals” and “fly-bys” who make up the bulk of unique visitors. “When people talk about the size of an audience, that’s a sham,” the report quotes Scout Analytics’ Matt Shanahan.

One goal stressed in the report is building a direct relationship with fans to help push contextual advertising. “By producing relevant journalism, deploying data intelligently and relying on social media — not just search engines — to drive traffic, (publishers) can gather a more devoted and involved readership, one that advertisers will also prefer,” note the authors.

Examiner.com, for instance, does very well when it encourages writes to match their output to social media, search…and advertising. Pet writers did very well last year matching coverage of dog adoption and pet shelters, pushing CPMs from $3-$5 to $11 for P&G’s Iams pet food, a key Examiner sponsor.

In theory, other passion subjects do well too. High school sports especially stands out. The Dallas Morning News’ High School Game Time registers 14 pages a month compared with entertainment (2.5 pages), news (2.78 pages), weather (4.83 pages) and sports (7.71 pages). It also grosses $700,000 a year of new ad dollars, in partnership with local cable coverage. This year, it is launching a $1.99 iPhone app, which represents new circulation revenues, along with heavy user paywalls, such as the one recently enacted by The New York Times.

That’s important. Like others, I’ve actually come to conclusion that the news organizations that have the market power to erect such paywalls are the ones that ultimately survive. For The Times, which has boosted per copy costs to $2 a day, circulation dollars have inched up to $683.4 million a year, just behind display advertising, which has fallen from $1.27 billion to $780.4 million. Next year, it doesn’t seem out of the question that circulation will surpass display.

The post Review: ‘The Story So Far — What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Some cities have unique professional communities that make them a company town with its own media. Washington D.C., of course, is a government town, well served by Bonneville’s WFED-AM. Similarly Huntsville, Alabama, is a space town; Los Angeles is a movie town; New York is a finance town. Each has its own media.

The medical community, of course, has lots of company towns that are centers of research, investment and specialization. Tapping into that is MedCity Media, which is headquartered in Cleveland (i.e., The Cleveland Clinic).

Among its products are MedCityNews, a local, business-oriented medical news/citizens journalism feed that is available for syndication by local media, and MedCity Life, a local city guide that “targets business travelers, the local medical industry and anyone who wants to be around the medical industry, including potential employees and future medical students.”

The company has set up local sites in a number of medical hubs, including Cleveland, Research Triangle Park, the Twin Cities, Ann Arbor, Boston, Chicago, Madison and Pittsburgh. It is being advised by interactive news pioneer Merrill Brown, among others.

Local medical news is correctly driven by the medical business — there isn’t much that is local about local medical health beyond allergies. But the city guide especially intrigues us. Each city guide has an editor who researches the local venues, events and culture. MedCity Life’s basic concept is that “stakeholders know the business reputation of our medical cities, (but) they are less informed on the work-play-life aspects of these markets.

“They don’t know which bars and events naturally attract their peers,” notes the collateral. “That’s why Akron’s Doc’s Who Rock event is in there; and why we mention one of Minnesota’s main med-tech eateries, The Good Day Cafe; and why we pay tribute to Leonard Medical School in Raleigh, the first black medical school in the Deep South.”

The post MedCity Goes After Medical Hubs; Focus on News, City Guide appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

“Content is king.” It’s one of the oldest, most frequently trumpeted maxims in media. Original work commands a premium, while aggregation and curation are merely commoditized collections for easy distribution…or so the thinking goes. Only, what happens if the script is flipped? That’s the question that Martin Nisenholtz, senior VP of digital operations at The New York Times, pondered in a recent keynote address at NAA mediaXchange in Dallas.

Nisenholtz believes that the news ecosystem is now inverted. Content reigned in the print and portal eras, but “platforms won in Web 2.0.” If there is any lingering doubt, take a quick look at the valuations and market caps of leading digital platforms (Google, Facebook) as compared with top publishers, and the “who won?” debate summarily ends.

Largely open platforms such as Google, Twitter and Facebook (though debatable) capitalized on a confluence of drivers to control Web 2.0: broadband acceleration, mobile growth, open-source tools (SaaS) and flexible standards for “re-mixing data” (i.e., RSS).

If Web 2.0 has been decided, is the game entirely over? Nisenholtz isn’t willing to concede the point just yet. In fact, The Times new digital subscription model (don’t call it a “paywall”) is one attempt to cultivate a “web of managed links” by finding a “new equilibrium between content and platforms.” Another is Ongo, a personalized news service that customizes the reading experience across multiple sources and categories. The Times, Gannett and The Washington Post each have a financial stake in the platform.

Nisenholtz insists that these are platform-agnostic efforts to control and moderate content flow, not lock it down. Where the “lock down” is occurring is with audience data because, as Facebook, Twitter and Groupon valuations have shown, he who controls the audience data controls the money. As an example, The Times no longer participates with any ad networks.

But an elephant-in-the-room question persists: Ongo is a paid platform ($6.99 per month). Facebook, Twitter, The Huffington Post Flipboard, Instapaper, Pulse, Zite and numerous others are not. If The Times’ publishing contemporaries don’t move in lockstep to similarly control their content, then profuse free options will continue to exist. And if that’s the case, why would anyone pay? This is one of many reasons why Ongo launches with few guarantees. And a reason why fellow media execs may be reticent to join.

It’s all part of the tangled “web of managed links” that Nisenholtz is trying to weave.

The post NAA mediaXchange: NYT’s Nisenholtz Envisions a ‘Web of Managed Links’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

AOL will buy The Huffington Post for $300 million in cash and $15 million in stock, and put Arianna Huffington in charge of the AOL Local sites (MapQuest, Patch, MovieFone) as well as its growing collection of opinionated tech and vertical news properties, such as TechCrunch, Engadget and Popeater. AOL’s vertical sites, such as TMZ.com, run by David Eun — the former “MediaGlow” properties — will continue to be run separately.

The acquisition of The Huffington Post might be seen as the crown jewel of an AOL strategy that has rounded up some of the most provocative sites that bring consumers back to check multiple times a day. The Huffington Post will add its tabloid-like, huge headlines on its front page to AOL’s already successful funneling.

The service relies on the contribution of hundreds of inexpensive-but-often famous contributors who are happy for the exposure. It also relies on aggregated content. As such, HuffPo represents a different view of the industry’s future than Yahoo’s $100 million acquisition of Associated Content, which commissions content based on demand analyzed by search algorithm — although a content farm would fit too. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong was an original investor in Associated Content.

The Huffington Post gets a lot of mileage from its links to pictures of semi-naked women, and its provocative headlines, including, it seems, anything to do with Sarah Palin. It has a tabloid-like appeal and represents a liberal alternative to Fox News on the right. It receives more than 25 million unique visitors a month.

Strategically, however, The Huffington Post is more about its successful verticalization of 25 vertical headings ranging from politics, media and entertainment (the early ones) to newer ones such as green, books, divorce, comedy and college.

The vertical strategy, indeed, was first explored as The Huffington Post began to branch out in local, with city editions developed for Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Denver. The irony is that local, after a big splash, has been backburnered by HuffPo as it saw a bigger bang for the buck by pushing more efficiently into the other verticals.

Will local become more of a priority under Huffington? It might, in a sideways manner. Editorially, Huffington noted on her site that Patch’s broad scale now provides “an incredible infrastructure for citizen journalism in time for the 2012 election, and a focus on community and local solutions that have been an integral part of HuffPost’s DNA.”

Business-wise, one of the reasons Patch has spent so heavily to launch so many editions so quickly is to scale nationally. That would allow it to heavily market the Patch brand — and attract national advertisers for geotargeting. With a broader collection of vertical content, the branding effort might now be more efficient. But the brand may not be Patch (or MapQuest, or MovieFone) so much as The Huffington Post.

The post AOL Buys Huffington Post; Huffington to Run AOL Local appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The Internet, and now mobile, has long been an excellent way to present the proverbial “hyperlocal” news content, those stories that are just too parochial to make the local news broadcast or the pages of the local metro daily. Finding a way to make hyperlocal truly hyperlocal and how to make it pay have been the big challenges.

This morning at ILM:10 we gathered some of the leading businesses in this category and drilled down on how their products work.

Patch stands out in the local news crown because it focuses on using professional journalists to provide coverage of a community, rather than relying on aggregating content or relying on user-submitted content.

Patch President Warren Webster defended this model. “You have to have that local journalist producing that original content, that is the No. 1 differentiator for Patch.” He said that in looking at other attempts at hyperlocal, the lack of community connection was a key element of those that failed.

Unlike Patch, Fwix is all about aggregating content, not creating it. “We index the Web by location,” said founder and CEO Darian Shirazi. Ultimately, the objective is not to be a news site, but a “local search company.”

Fwix has built pages for 50,000 neighborhoods across the country. Shirazi said the content (news, events, reviews, photos, and social content like tweets and check-ins) is aggregated down to the place level. He showed an example of a local coffeehouse he frequents in San Francisco with a place page that shows reviews as well as tweets and check-ins at that location.

Satbir Khanuja is president and CEO of DataSphere, a company that provides hyperlocal Web sites for local broadcasters. One of the challenge for local broadcasters has been that they gather a lot of hyperlocal content, but they do not have the inventory in their traditional media business to distribute it.

DataSphere builds hyperlocal sites that feed into the main station site. Khanuja cited one example of a local broadcaster partner (KOMO News in Seattle) that organized its content into 55 neighborhood sites that aggregate local news and deals.

The panelists differed a bit on business models.

Shirazi said the model of serving ads on local inventory and doing a revenue share is a modest at best opportunity, and more work is needed to find the right model.

Khanuja and Mark Josephson, CEO of Outside.in, disagreed.

Josephson said that if anything, there will not be enough local inventory in the near future to meet demand. He described Outside.in as a hybrid of what Fwix and DataSphere offer.

The post ILM:10 The New Local News appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

At ILM:10, SB Nation CEO Jim Bankoff revealed that his fleet of brand-based online sports communities is now experimenting with high school sports through the launch of a Washington, D.C., trial site (part of DC.SBNation.com) that will “test if the model scales to that level.”

The competition in the digital sports space — with CBS, Comcast, FOX, Yahoo and the ubiquitous ESPN all locking horns — is as intense as the passion of the fans whom these networks covet. That’s exactly why Bankoff has taken SB Nation down an explicitly different path, one that doesn’t try to roll up individual sports communities into larger groups, but instead embraces digital fragmentation by acknowledging that the “Web is topical” and then building 300 different brands around individual teams, leagues and regions.

The crux of the network of blogs is community-driven content from paid bloggers and fan forums built around a “strong partisan focus on sports teams.” SB Nation’s bloggers’ ability to expertly weave a palette of interactive content (original work, social media, community dialogue) drives engagement with the brands, leading Bankoff to extol this as the “highest form of art online.”

As for monetization, don’t say “sponsorships,” a dirty word in Bankoff’s book because of the overt commercial connotation it brings with fans who view community forums as safe havens or private clubs. SB Nation’s value is not in selling, per se, but in “getting people talking about brands” naturally within the gates of the online community.

The company is not currently pursuing any paid-content tiers, whether premium information or gaming (fantasy leagues, sports games).

SB Nation faces ambitious obstacles to scale because of the aforementioned rampant fragmentation and the challenge of simultaneously serving several hundred brands. Bankoff is encouraged, however. He stresses that the latest iteration of the Web makes production and distribution much simpler. As such, SB Nation can add “new sites at low incremental costs and keep quality high.”

The post ILM:10: SB Nation Scaling to High School Sports appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

If the first two decades of the local Internet were primarily about on-boarding traffic, then CBS Local Digital Media President Ezra Kucharz foresees that the next decade will be about “opening doors to consumers, getting them the information they want, and getting them to transact.”

This philosophy drives CBS Local’s digital philosophy across its 28 owned-and-operated TV stations and 39 radio properties. Four consumer desires undergird this strategy: robust content (news, sports, local info, weather and traffic), business listings, local deals and answers to local questions. Kucharz shared with the ILM:10 audience that CBS Local will launch a Local Answers platform in January that will address queries as diverse as “who do the Yankees play?” and “who’s a trusted plumber?”

Like so many others who see deals as the hottest inferno of opportunity in the red-hot local ecosystem, Kucharz is also a believer. He spearheaded CBS’ deals launch four months ago and calls local deals “the best way for SMB to get local consumers in the door right now.” He also stresses that business listings must include “rich experiences” that exceed mere links within a directory.

Of course, none of these insights is necessarily new, so what positions CBS Local to capitalize where others may fail?

According to Kucharz, the network’s well-etched brand advantages with its local business partners distinguish it. SMBs encounter several problems in moving their message and money online, from an aversion to complex digital buying to a lack of creative to a general lack of coherent strategy. CBS’ formula to leverage its assets is “the reach of traditional media + the targeting of online media + mobile media = results for SMBs.”

To generate even greater brand and platform synergies, CBS Local is in the process of rolling up its various properties in major markets under a larger banner. In New York, for instance, three radio and one TV have been fused into CBS New York. This approach will scale to its 24 major metros in 2011. The bundled effects (both in revenue and traffic) of rolling up individual properties into an aggregated brand have produced “1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 7″ benefits.

The post ILM:10: CBS’ Ezra Kucharz Envisions ‘the Next Decade in Local’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.