At Leading in Local: Interactive Local Media Dec. 10-12 in San Francisco, we are presenting 50 of local’s top players. Want some homework? We’ve pulled recent coverage of some of our speakers from our Local Media Watch blog. There’s plenty of great reading here, and you’ll experience — first hand — how fast things have been changing.

Patrick Barry, GM, Intuit/DemandForce
Intuit Acquires Online Scheduler

Matthew Berk, CEO, Lucky Oyster
Matthew Berk Rethinks WOM via Lucky Oyster

Brian Boland, VP, Facebook
Facebook/Google Vertical Wars: Facebook Grabs a Google Auto Exec

Suzanne Cooper, Managing Editor, SF Chronicle
SF Chronicle’s Cooper: The Fight to Save Journalism

Jeremy Geiger, CEO, Retailigence
Closed Loop Mobile Local Shopping: A Conversation with Retailigence

Dan Hight, SVP, xAd
XAd and Posterscope: Retargeting For The Real World

Ziad Ismail, SVP, Marchex
Marchex Maps Call Monetization Genome

Mark Roberge, SVP, Hubspot
BIA-Kelsey Briefing: Hubspot Points to a New Way of Selling

Chris Schroeder, Author , Startup Rising
Bookshelf: Christopher Schroeder’s Startup Rising

Sean Smyth, VP, Groupon
A Look at Groupon’s New Partner Network

Eckart Walther, CEO, CardSpring
Merchants Drive Their Own Transaction Marketing via Cardspring Connect

The post Reading List: Recent Blog Coverage of LIL: ILM Speakers appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Merchants sometimes like to control their own promotions to their own list of customers, rather than waiting in line for Groupon or other deals publishers to do it for them. Yelp, for instance, is one company that has had success enabling merchants to publish deals as they like. It has allowed for over 25,000 self-published deals.

Now along comes CardSpring, which ups the ante beyond simple deals to “transaction marketing” by enabling merchants to write their own promotions, distribute them over CardSpring’s new publisher network, and redeem and analyze the deal on their Point of Sales.

The service’s “near” real-time analytics can show merchants where their redeemed promotions are coming from and what they bought. It typically takes a second or two for an offer to show up after a purchase is made.

FourSquare and MOGL are among the most significant publishers providing CardSpring Connect to at least some of their merchant advertisers. Others include Thanx, Roximity Moblico, and OnStripe.

The launch of CardSpring Connect is a significant milestone for the San Francisco-based company, which has been working since 2012 with payments leader First Data to provide check-in promotions at certain venues. More recently, it has also begun integrating with VeriFone, a  POS network to enable developers to build their own card-linked services.

CEO Eckhart Walther tells us that CardSpring’s new initiative is “Google Analytics for the retail world.” It is also part of the broader trend towards performance marketing, which he says has now begun to bury brand advertising. “In the 1980s, Yahoo was all brand advertising,” he says. Now, “Yahoo online advertising is 80 percent sold on performance,” or at least, advertising that has a performance component on it.

CardSpring’s efforts here are likely to compete against a host of loyalty programs, at least for merchant mindshare. Walther, however, emphasizes that the company is not competing with other companies but seeking to become their infrastructure in return for a nominal piece of the action. CardSpring has no intentions of launching its own sales channels, he says.

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Big Data means a lot of things to people. The analytics certainly help. But is it really helping promote new sales and services? That’s the challenge, as companies seek to add coupons and consumer info directly to the payment card or POS. When that finally happens, payment ecosystem players such as banks and payment processors will be transformed into marketers.

Merchant Warehouse, a large processing company, has begun to develop these capabilities as widely accepted APIs. So have other companies such as CardSpring, a 20 person San Francisco company.

Yesterday, CardSpring announced a broad deal with HP’s VeriFone Systems, the POS giant with 20 million locations worldwide. The partnership will integrate CardSpring’s web service platform with VeriFone’s open interface to its gateway. Using the system, developers can create card-linked services for any POS system that VeriFone interfaces with.

The VeriFone deal marks a watershed for CardSpring, adding to a roster of complementary relationships, such as one with First Data that enables it to work with its payment processing customers. CardSpring and First Data work with FourSquare and others.

“It is not just about marketing. It is about a broad set of consumer services,” noted CEO Eckhart Walther during a discussion with us in April. “We really help publishers talk to retailers.”

Walther noted that different parts of the payment ecosystem are currently stuck in different silos, limiting the kinds of information that can be shared. For instance, there are currently different payment processing platforms and development tool kits, as well as different payment channels, such as magnetic stripes, smart cards and e-wallets. It’s especially important as the POS moves from proprietary hardware to more open systems based on tablets.

He suggests that the current relationship between retailers and consumers doesn’t get much closer than a generic ad network. These may display an ad based on what consumers have browsed on the Web.

But “the closer you get to the merchant, the more you can create more interesting consumer experiences,” says Walther. “You want to help Target work with Yahoo on a Sony TV promotion. All these parties want to work together. Right now, “there is no way to do it without sending an entire cloud file.”

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It is a given in some circles that the next era of promotions will be driven by electronic wallets that perform transactions, manage deals and coupons, and target and engage loyal consumers. Google, American Express, MasterCard, LivingSocial, Groupon, AT&T, Microsoft and Square are just some of the companies that are purported to be developing some type of electronic wallet.

The result, however, may be a fragmented market where no standard takes hold. A $5 Foursquare rebate from American Express is a nice offer, but leaves out MasterCard holders. Moreover, while the e-wallets concepts can work for online deals, where do they leave the offline deals that make up the bulk of transactions today?

Those are the questions raised by CardSpring, a venture-funded firm that seeks to build a common payment and loyalty platform. Cardspring was launched 18 months ago by several Silicon Valley platform vets, and has received $10 million from Access and Greylock, among others.

Today, CardSpring announced a white-label pact with First Data, the giant financial company that processes transactions for roughly half of U.S. merchants. The First Data “OfferWise” solution will link offers to major credit association brands, PIN and signature debit cards. Major reseller affiliations with SMB ad outlets such as Yellow Pages are in development.

The company’s basic idea is to make it easy for retailers to instantly add their own promotions and loyalty programs to any transaction via payment terminals or smartphone. Consumers need to self-activate individual apps on their cards via the Web (not always easy) or via swipes at an in-store terminal (easier).

CEO and founder Eckart Walther told BIA/Kelsey that the transactions companies are experts at selling batch driven and inflexible payment services. But they are limited. In the mid-1990s, he notes that the industry went though a number of failed first generation smart payment services, such as DigiCash and CyberCash. He suggests that the addition of data services — advertising — makes CardSpring’s smart payment services more scalable.

Walther’s goal is to add a “Payment Rail” to SMBs indirectly via small-business publishers, such as Yelp or a Yellow Pages company. Working with CardSpring, a company like Yelp can provide a plumber with a real-time ability to get cash back, provide an upsell or refer friends.

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