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.

Karen Traversi Kovalesi, President & CEO, Geary LSF, a San Francisco integrated digital marketing agency, told BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL that marketers and brands must think across media and organizational boundaries to bring customers to a transaction decision.

“You get business results, not just business tactics,” she said. “Omni-Channel is a mindset, not just a business practice.” Geary LSF must work to create unique combinations of digital messaging and engagements to bridge he national/local marketing challenge, Taversi Kovaleski told the audience, sharing examples from three industries, professional placement, healthcare and consumer products.

“Local reigns supreme,” she said. “Brands get people to the door, but once they are engaged they are looking for something personal about the purchase — these are local decisions.” Even in B2B purchases, which many believe are fairly cut-and-dried standardized decisions, the individual wants to be informed very early in the process, which requires multiple messaging options to address the lead. In the consumer space, too, there are many touchpoint along the way rather than a single monolithic campaign “But many of our clients, we find, are not doing that,” she said.

She pointed to three clients: Kelly Services; MedStar Washington Hospital Center, BumbleBee, the seafood company.

Kelly is a global leader in workforce solutions. Over the past few years, the workforce Kelly supports has changed to emphasize skills over location — work can now be performed anywhere. Hiring companies no longer need to see Kelly reps. It allows Kelly to reach more potential business partner/customers through digital, which opens an engagement process that can be fulfilled largely online. Individuals doing the work, however, do like to talk to someone, to get the personal touch, so Kelly must balance its hiring company-facing messaging with local opportunities for business talent to connect and learn about the opportunities with Kelly.

“The question is ‘How do you fill that pipeline when you don’t have as many local offices?'” The Kelly offices used to define the for workers who may now interact with the company first and primarily through digital channels. But when there is a physical engagement, it must align with and reinforce the online message.

The Kelly Services brand has evolved and they need to harmonize that message in marketing channels as the markets continues to morph based on new technology. The change cuts both ways. For example, Kelly now fills senior positions. It’s not just about the typing pool of its early years.

“Are the right level of people thinking of me in terms of finding their [employment] opportunity?” Traversi Kovaleski asked. The answer as “no” too often, she said.

When Kelly Services wanted to enter the IT talent market, they partnered with Geary LSF. Rather than doing traditional recruitment messaging, they launched a thought leadership content marketing program targeted at the people they want to place, senior level IT managers. Using thought leadership content across channels was critical to showing Kelly understood the IT market. The outcome was that IT pros did start to reach out to Kelley and they filled their pipeline, giving them the human resources to succeed in the IT placement market.

“Content marketing did work — now we can leverage across to other areas,” she said, including native advertising and mobile, as well as SEO aimed at recruiting talent to the IT space.

“It’s about measurement. We start to layer the insights using geo-targeting, feedback and attribution to understand how they work together to achieve brand goals,” Traversi Kovaleski said. The campaign continued to develop and now includes video on LinkedIn aimed at recruitment and brand awareness for Kelly in the IT market.

MedStar Washington Hospital Center, a Washington D.C. specialty hospital that is nationally known, with a have a regional marketing footprint.

The question, “How can they draw patients from other regions?” defined the project. Because MedStar provides services to a network of hospitals, the campaign had to succeed without cannibalizing partner hospitals in the region. Ultimately, the campaign aimed at reaching potential customers two or three states away, as well as globally.

The Geary LSF plan targeted patients based on condition, using SEO to connect with people with specific illnesses. Starting with that paid search, it delivers urgent patient engagement. Next, “we need to get them to make an appointment,” even across state lines. Here, Traversi Kovaleski said, video and social come into play. Patients find common cause in social environments, where doctor recommendations are shared based on actual experience with MedStar.

“People want to understand the doctor and the tools they’ll use.” At this point in the funnel, Geary LSF introduced video stories. “They are small and consumable and can be displayed with localized slugs to deliver relevant messages.” How do I engage an individual to take action, she asked and provided the answer: Video and social.

“Facebook can play a more integral part in the final step [to a transaction],” she added. In healthcare, the sharing of experience can trigger the final outcome. In reviews, Facebook isn’t a last-click experience, but it’s an important step that must be augmented by marketing tools. The human touch is essential to the healthcare market, she concluded. (See BIA/Kelsey’s Healthcare Vertical Industry report, released last week.)

With BumbleBee, Geary LSF had a different problem. BumbleBee is a product brand competing in retail environments with other products.

BumbleBee is in the midst of the rollout of its new “SuperFresh” frozen seafood currently in select cities and stores across the U.S. They select key stores in markets, so ZIP Code targeting is not appropriate, because a store could be very remote to many people in a postal code region.

MaxPoint, a Geary LSF partner, allowed BumbleBee to use intent targeting within a ZIP Code, providing more granularity in the message and targeting customers of specific stores. At the point of engagement online, typically a coupon offer, video was effective to point consumers to the stores.

This push model will eventually give way to opt-in coupons delivered on the phone or an in-store kiosk, Traversi Kovaleski said. These “pull offers are more humane and engaging. “We not doing anything ‘too crazy,’ she explained, but the brand must think in terms of a series of steps that marketers need to exectue on to deliver the client’s desired results by moving customers efficiently from initial brand awareness to a buying decision.

When asked how BumbleBee use beacons, Traversi Kovaleski said the use of MaxPoint data to identify specific geo-targets will make the engagement more personal. Early geo-fencing efforts by the brand were “a little creepy,” so she is urging clients to use opt-in couponing. She said the move to pull versus push will demand very personalized offers.

It’s notable that in each case she cited, video played a critical role. It puts a face and voice on a product or service, and is a vital complement to social, where largely anonymous interactions can be converted to personal engagement.

The mindset of omni-channel is to think across boundaries within your organization, to segment markets and address customers individually, Traversi Kovaleski said. She added that it is critical to think of supplementing organic search with paid search which moves consumers toward individually meaningful experience. Personal touches in user experience are critical. It must be combined with measurement, which can be “less specific than we currently like,” to support an omni-channel marketing process.

Asked by BIA/Kelsey’s Charles Laughlin about the toughest part of the national/local process, she said “Consistency when going to the field.”

With BumbleBee it is message alignment is easier because it is a corporate message defined by product, she explained. A Kelly, on the other hand, may have locations battling with one another locally, which needs to be curbed to ensure consistent messaging to the market. This echoed a key message from yesterday’s sessions about franchise marketing: Messages must be focused on the customer instead of the “local battles” franchisees or different teams within a business may think they are fighting.

The post At BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL: Embrace the Omni-Channel Mindset appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Wanderful Media, which has been tasked by the newspaper industry to remake the circular industry in the mobile social era. has raised a new round of $14.5 Million. Altogether, the company has raised $50.5 Million since its September 2012 launch.

The company is primarily known for Find&Save, which relaunched one year ago. It now serves 500 affiliate sites, including all Top 50 DMAs. Find&Save provides geo-targeted distribution of offers for 375 retailers and 150,000 retail locations. While iPhone and iPad apps have been Find&Save’s initial focus, an Android version was launched today.

Speaking at the Local Search Association meeting today in Huntington Beach, CA, CEO Ben Smith said the company is set to put the new money to work. Upwards of $10 million will be committed this year to app distribution and “making sure people are installing our apps,” he said.

“It’s much like managing your SEO — it’s not trivial and requires significant investment,” said Smith. He added that mobile customers typically only use 10 apps on a frequent basis. “The better way to approach mobile is to consider geo/location data as a way to augment and craft customized marketing messages,” he said.

Facebook integration is also key to “tying it all together,” added Smith. “We get the geo/location data from the mobile app — but Facebook provides the demographic context required to make the data acquired by Wanderful actionable.”

The post Wanderful Media at LSA: Ben Smith on the $14.5 Million Raise, Facebook appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

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It’s that time of year again; BIA/Kelsey’s spring release of its local media forecast. This is broken down into its media components, such as Online, TV, Yellow Pages, Mobile, etc… The full forecast will be out in a few weeks. Today we release the first component: Mobile.

Part of the Executive Summary and charts are below. The top-line takeaway is overall U.S. mobile ad revenue growth: $7.2 billion last year to $30.3 billion by 2018. That includes search, display, SMS, video and native social (i.e. FB news feed ads). The latter caused us to dial figures up from last year.

Zeroing in on the forecast’s main theme of location targeted mobile ads, those went from $2.9 billion last year to $15.7 billion in 2018. That makes them 40 percent of overall mobile ad revenues, growing to 52 percent in 2018. There are lots of reasons for that, some of which are outlined below.

Lastly, it’s notable that this forecast release coincides with today’s IAB release of prior year online and mobile audits. It’s good to see accuracy in their figures, especially the mobile numbers which I believe due to parity with the figures I devised. Their $7.1B is just shy of our $7.2B.

To engage over these numbers or for a full copy of the forecast, email my colleague Steve Passwaiter. And we’ll be discussing these figures in greater depth during our Leading in Local conference next month in Atlanta. Email me directly for a discount code at mbolandATbiakelsey.com.

Executive Summary

— Location targeted mobile advertising — the centerpiece of this forecast — is included within total U.S. mobile advertising (see slide 22 for this breakdown).

— To understand the localized portion requires first panning back to the total mobile ad revenue picture. Here, BIA/Kelsey projects revenue to grow from $7.2 billion in 2013 to $30.3 billion in 2018. This projection has increased from our previous forecast (November 2013).

— Increased projections result from guidance from mobile ad networks and ad share leaders such as Google (33 percent of paid clicks now come from mobile devices); and Facebook (53 percent of ad revenues attributed to mobile, up from 23 percent last March).

— Google’s Enhanced Campaigns*, launched in July, will compound these factors by forcing mobile ads on search advertisers (default campaign inclusion). This will accelerate a mobile advertising learning curve and adoption cycle for all search advertisers, including SMBs.

— Enhanced Campaigns will also notably close the current gap between mobile ad rates and desktop equivalents (rates are demand-driven).

— This will play out as an influx of advertisers in Google’s bid marketplace for mobile keywords will naturally boost bid pressure and thus CPCs. There is shift is already underway, evidenced by data shared with us by search marketing agencies.

— The share of the overall mobile ad revenue pie attributed to location based campaigns will grow from 40 percent ($2.9 billion) in 2013 to 52 percent ($15.7 billion) in 2018.

— This share shift remained fairly consistent from our previous forecast, as the factors driving localized mobile ad adoption have remained steady.

— These factors include advertiser demand, higher ad performance for location targeted ad campaigns, and resulting increases in mobile ad rates (CPMs, CPCs).

— Other important factors driving this localized share include the adoption of mobile local advertising tactics (i.e. geo-fencing, click-to-call, click to map) by national advertisers, who account for most U.S. mobile ad spending.

— SMB adoption — a slow but growing share of localized mobile advertising — will likewise impact its growth.

— For national brand advertisers, the shift to location targeted mobile advertising will be driven by their natural evolution to adopt effective, increasingly available, and currently undervalued mobile local ad inventory.

— Innovation among ad networks and ad tech providers (e.g., Enhanced Campaigns) will provide additional incentive and impetus for this transition.

— For SMBs, the sector’s digital media adoption traditionally lags behind national advertisers due to lower levels of tech savvy, budget, time and human resources.

— However, SMB-driven growth is expected throughout our forecast period due to evolving SMB savvy and growing propensity to self-serve with offerings like Google AdWords and Facebook (pull).

— Also at play will be the accelerating mobile innovation, sales and bundling efforts of local media companies (push).

— As an example of the push paradigm, Yelp last month partnered with YP. The publisher’s 4,000 local sales reps will now be armed with Yelp advertising packages, which include mobile presence and distribution.

The post Fresh BIA/Kelsey Data: U.S. Mobile Revs Grow from $7.2B to $30B by 2018 appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

We have all gotten used to looking at our phones and seeing several notifications on our home screens. From text messages, to emails, to sports updates, we are able to receive notifications for almost anything. More than ever, local businesses have apps that provide push notifications to consumers to encourage traffic.

— According to BIA/Kelsey’s Consumer Commerce Monitor ™, 35% of consumers who use smartphones when shopping locally regularly use apps to assist with their shopping experience. Most are not just using one shopping app either. On average consumers have 3.5 different apps they regularly use when shopping locally.

Push notifications have contributed substantially to app use in relation to local shopping due in part to the increase in engagement that happens once a consumer joins. According to the “Good Push Index” released by Urban Airship, on average mobile application users who have opted in to push messages have a long term retention rate that is 92% higher than those who have opted out of the messages. Not only is app retention substantially increased, but app engagement is also increased. Opt-in app users open retail apps 12.5 times per month on average compared with only 9.0 opens for those who opted not to receive push messages.

For marketers, the challenge is converting these consumers to buyers. In the local shopping space, according to BIA/Kelsey data, promotion and sales for local shoppers close the loop. Coupon reminders are a popular use of push notifications for retail apps.

According to BIA/Kelsey’s Consumer Commerce Monitor, 43% of local purchases made by smartphone users within the last six months were made through promotions or sales, such as discount deals, “daily deals”, coupons, or similar types of discount offers. Thirty-six percent of respondents to RadiumOne’s survey of women and their use of coupons on their mobile devices felt that push notifications of mobile coupon offers were useful.

Geo-targeting these coupon push notifications is important to drive purchases from local shoppers, especially smartphone users who are using their phones for local shopping in a variety of locations. Most importantly this includes 68% of smartphone users using their phones in the store, according to BIA/Kelsey data. We can also see that smartphone users are often on their phones when they are out and about. With 68% of smartphone users using their smartphones in public and 60% using them in transit, geo-targeting would prove to be highly effective in encouraging nearby consumers to pay more attention to the local businesses around them.

While the future of mobile push notifications is uncertain, BIA/Kelsey’s Mike Boland gives us his prediction in his blog post, BIA/Kelsey Mobile Outlook: 5 Predictions and a Wild Card.

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Today, BIA/Kelsey released its U.S. Local Media Forecast (2012-2017), showing local ad revenues of $133B (2012) growing to $152B (2017). This includes advertising targeted to geographically specific audiences, such as Newspapers, Radio, TV, Interactive, etc..

One important slice of this forecast is the location targeted ad revenues attributed to mobile. That’s of course a small but quickly growing segment. In addition to these location targeted mobile revs, we panned back to look at the overall U.S. mobile ad revenue picture.

Interestingly, location targeted mobile ad revenues will grow to 54 percent of overall mobile revenues by 2017. This is driven by many market forces we examine in great detail and from discussions with industry players. We also break down revenue by format such as search and display.

The forecasting process is a doozy but we get bulletproof results and valuable findings. We’re looking to continue our streak of accurate numbers — affirmed in retrospect — for the past 5 years of looking closely at the mobile ad opportunity, not to mention decades covering local media.

The mobile exec summary is below, and BIA/Kelsey clients can log in to download the full report. Anyone else interested in finding out more can email me at mbolandATbiakelsey.com. We’ll also discuss these findings in greater depth next month at our Leading in Local conference.

Executive Summary

— Location targeted mobile advertising — the centerpiece of this forecast — is inclusive of total U.S. mobile advertising (see slide 19 for this breakdown).

— To understand the localized portion requires first panning back to the total mobile ad revenue picture. Here, BIA/Kelsey projects revenue to grow from $3.65B in 2012 to $20.68B in 2017. This projection has increased from our previous forecast (March 2013).

— Increased projections result from guidance from mobile ad networks and ad share leaders such as Google (33% of paid clicks now come from mobile devices); and Facebook (49% of ad revenues attributed to mobile, up from 23% in March).

— Google’s Enhanced Campaigns*, launched in July, will compound these factors by forcing mobile ads on search advertisers (default campaign inclusion). This will accelerate a mobile advertising learning curve and adoption cycle for all search advertisers, including SMBs.

— Enhanced Campaigns will also notably close the current gap between mobile ad rates and desktop equivalents (rates are demand-driven).

— This will play out as an influx of advertisers in Google’s bid marketplace for mobile keywords will naturally boost bid pressure and thus CPCs. There is shift is already underway, evidenced by data shared with us by search marketing agencies.

— The share of the overall mobile ad revenue pie attributed to location based campaigns will grow from 37% ($1.4B) in 2012 to 52% ($10.8B) in 2017.

— This share shift remained fairly consistent from our previous forecast, as the factors driving
localized mobile ad adoption have remained steady.

— These factors include advertiser demand, higher ad performance from location targeted ad campaigns, and resulting increases in mobile ad rates (CPMs, CPCs).

— Other important factors driving this localized share include the adoption of mobile local advertising tactics (i.e. geo-fencing, click-to-call, click to map) by national advertisers, who account for most U.S. mobile ad spending.

— SMB adoption — a slow but growing share of localized mobile advertising — will likewise impact its growth.

The post Location Targeted Mobile Revs to Reach $10.8B by 2017 appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Whether U.S. citizens actually have any type of privacy anymore seems to be a growing topic of discussion among Americans. Concerns range from the government spying on phone conversations, to online ads that are just a little TOO applicable, to retail stores tracking you while you shop. Senator Chuck Schumer, D-NY has begun to turn his attention to this issue.

During his keynote speech at the recent Street Fight Summit in New York City, Schumer addresses what is being done to ensure location privacy for consumers.

Schumer talked about his goal for New York City to become the most tech savvy city in the U.S. Currently, the technology sector is a prominent industry in the area and, according to Schumer, its growth does not appear to be slowing down.

The amount of information about consumers that comes with geo-targeting gives technology companies and retailers an enormous amount of information and with that comes great responsibility.  The concept of “Big Brother” comes to mind, and many consumers are uncomfortable with the idea of being “watched.”

Schumer cited FTC Guidelines for local tracking, published in February 2013, that detail two major changes that he says are needed to address privacy concerns.

First, any establishment that participates in geo-targeting towards mobile devices should provide notice at the location, and second they should obtain consent for content that consumers would find sensitive (contacts, photos, calendar, etc.). The idea is that consumers want to know they are being tracked and they want to be given the opportunity to opt out. By establishments doing this, consumers will know exactly what they are getting themselves into.

The Senator worked with the Future of Privacy Forum to create a new recommended code of conduct which was announced about two weeks ago. This new code provides best practices for companies to abide by these new FTC guidelines. The FPF has also created a website called SmartStorePrivacy.com that has a list of technology companies that have committed to following this new code of conduct.

While the companies that have developed the technology for geo-targeting have agreed to the terms of the code of conduct by the Future of Privacy Forum, there are yet to be any retailers that have signed and agreed to these terms.

Schumer praised the digital advertising industry for being the “perfect example of politicians and business working together” to make U.S. consumers more comfortable with this innovative and controversial form of advertising. He also praised the industry for stepping up and trying to fix the problem.

The post Senator Schumer Tackles Location Privacy Issue appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

For iPromote CEO Michael Barr, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Now he’s trying to convince third-party publishers, and the local clients they represent, that it’s a no-brainer to serve keyword and location-based display ads alongside the text-based search ads they are already running. This is expressly what iPromote does with its LocalSearch offering.

Barr believes the answer is automated ease-of-use — that simplicity creates scalability. Only then will large-scale sellers add display to their toolkit and SMBs embrace it. The LocalSearch solution is built around the core idea of taking the work out of display while still producing fast, targeted ads to fulfill inventory needs and satisfy ROI demands.

A local merchant’s Web site or business listing URL is inserted, iPromote uses a combination of the client’s information and its own database content to create a display ad, and the publisher or business then pinpoints where and when the ad will run and the campaign budget.

The geotargeting built into the interface means that when a user queries a particular term and location, a locally and contextually relevant display ad will serve. Location-aware features enable “locally relevant display ads,” which, according to Barr, convert at a 2-5 times higher rate that generic display.

Image Credit: iPromote

The ads can be branded with either the publisher’s or the advertiser’s name. A dashboard allows for real-time campaign management and ready-made changes to ad content (drag and drop new photos, revise the business description, etc.). Ads are also optimized for mobile platforms.

IPromote is already in motion with several partners, and Barr has set a high-priority goal of attracting major IYPs and local search directories to the service … those that serve thousands of SMBs. These publishers would reserve display real estate on their search results pages and subsequently be able to bundle display offerings with existing search campaigns to drive down the cost of lead generation.

Once publishers place the ads on their own sites, they can then select other locations to distribute the ads. They can also blast them out across the iPromote Ad Network, which includes Yahoo, Bing, CitySearch, Local.com and many more publishers.

Barr and his team are banking on resurgent growth in the display market, and recent data show he’s on to something. This week, IAB reported that display-related advertising revenues for the first half of 2010 rose almost 16 percent year over year.

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Mobile ad network Millenial Media has posted its August S.M.A.R.T. report, which spotlights trends in mobile advertising and commerce based on activity across its network (both actual campaigns and network data). The latest release centers on mobile retail advertising and buying behavior in advance of the upcoming holiday shopping season.

Top takeaways from the report include:

– 27 percent of mobile subscribers who access retail content on their phones are mobile-only. In other words, they cannot be reached online or in-store … only through their mobile devices. This creates an entirely new and uniquely mobile retail audience for advertisers to cater to.

– Mobile retail users trend more affluent than the aggregate mobile audience, rating higher in all income brackets above $50,000. 

– Popular items that mobile retail users investigated included electronics (31 percent), clothing/accessories (29 percent) and books (21 percent) … all ripe holiday retail categories.

– On the advertising side, the majority of campaigns (57 percent) were still purposed for “broad reach,” although the remaining 43 percent had targeted audience reach goals. Among targeted campaigns, GEO was the most prevalent method (41 percent). Retail and restaurant franchises and banks were active geotargeters. Demographic targeting trailed closely (37 percent), with automotive (millenials) and pharmaceuticals (women) prevalent users of this method.

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