While 2010 has been lauded as “the year of local,” it has also seen an influx of interest and spending by national brands to drive neighborhood-level store traffic. These initiatives have taken diverse (and sometimes highly publicized) forms: Gap’s deal-a-day offer through Groupon, Best Buy’s mobile check-in experiments with Shopkick, and a host of real-time inventory providers (Google Product Search, Milo, NearbyNow) allowing retailers to engage customers at the apex of purchase intent.

Geomentum VP Casey Squier told the ILM:10 audience that, as a byproduct of this hyperlocal focus, national brands are “turning to large agencies to put together a local program that can be understood by C-level execs that resonates throughout the entire organization.”

That’s exactly what Geomentum hopes to do for its clients when it officially launches the new technology in March 2011. Spawning from traditional agencies, it allows its client to do store-level planning by layering their sales data on top of Geomentum’s 2,000 data points about local neighborhoods. Retailers can then alter their media mix accordingly to better reach customers where they live and buy.

Ultimately, this should foster higher-quality lead generation, which is exactly what Marchex is touting to agencies through its performance-based pay-per-call platform. Scott Greenberg, Marchex senior VP of strategic development, stressed that as online and mobile advertising becomes more complicated, merchants of all sizes still demand the simplicity and measurable quality of phone calls.

Marchex’s platform allows resellers to create and distribute ad content for its clients across a pay-per-call network. Because performance governs the business model, businesses pay only when the phone rings. While Greenberg reports that the platform is largely being sold to larger brands to enable them to track store-level leads, he also hopes that it continues to move down market to SMBs.

Marchex is placing its bets on calls, but Reply.com CEO Payam Zamani thinks that search and display can still be effective as long as these clicks, or leads, are “enhanced” to account for consumer intent and location. Otherwise, driving targeted traffic is both expensive and imprecise.

The pledge to businesses through the Reply Marketplace is simple: “sign up and receive locally targeted and intent specific prospects” based on particular customer actions being sought. Echoing Marchex, he noted that two-thirds of the company’s business comes from bigger businesses looking to locally target.

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One of the big hopes for local this year is … national. As local targeting tools get more granular, there has been an upsurge in national/local advertisers, especially as they focus on touching consumers on the local purchase level. Gannett Digital and MediaBrands’ Geomentum, for instance, are both riding the crest of national-local activities.

Gannett Digital Network GM Josh Resnik, who joined Gannett four years ago from AOL, says it isn’t so much about hyperlocal as “hyper-relevancy.” The Gannett network has 48 million unique visitors and a billion page views a month, he notes. The local titles carry the added benefit of being trusted brands in their communities.

“We create solutions across properties,” says Resnik, adding that “it is much easier to start locally,” and then “layer national business on top of it. It is hard to start national and go local.”

Resnik adds that his division’s focus is largely on working with “truly national advertisers” and providing them with reach across USA Today and 100+ local titles, as well as vertical Gannett properties such as Metromix and Highschoolsports.net and ad service providers such as PointRoll and ShopLocal. The network can also run custom campaigns, like Family Fitness Challenge, a recent campaign it ran in USA Today for Ninetendo with USA Today.

Geomentum, meanwhile, has launched “The HyperLocal Network” to create a local targeting component for its national advertiser clients. The network, which not only leverages online but mobile and digital out of home as well, has begun testing and will roll out actual services in 1Q 2011.

A division of MediaBrands (IPG), the third-largest ad services holding company, Geomentum controls roughly $2 billion of ad spending. Its units include NSA Media, a print buying firm; outdoor-advertising shop OSI; and Wahlstrom, the Certified Marketing Rep that focuses on directory marketing, mobile, search and social networking.

A core component of the Hyperlocal Network is Geomentum’s “Dynamic Local Video” partnership with Mixpo, which enables large TV advertisers to target local users with online video. Using Mixpo, marketers can respond to calls for action and other dynamic features. They can also track usage. Participating advertisers are expected to include not just retail clients, but also such categories as financial institutions, quick service restaurants and auto dealers.

Geomentum CEO Dave Walker, CEO says the key is to “understand the role that hyperlocal plays in an overall strategy. Local started becoming increasingly important nine months ago and really started heating up in earnest three months ago,” he says. We may not see a wholesale change of national for hyperlocal, but clients are willing to experiment, and make a portion of their marketing commitment more granular.”

Geomentum President Lisa Bradner is appearing on the “Agencies, Local Search and Display” session on Day 3 of ILM:10 along with Reply.com CEO Payam Zamani and Marchex Senior VP Scott Greenberg.

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Ad agencies have never really been a major part of the world of local online advertising. Apart from some geotargeting for their national and regional clients, they haven’t paid much attention to the many opportunities in local (geotarget banners, local search, couponing, directory and social).

Where there has been agency support, it has been largely on the certified marketing rep (CMR) side that is moving Yellow Pages/directional media dollars around to IYPs and other local “service” media. Companies like TMP’s 15miles and Wahlstrom have done well with this, as have more broadly configured third-party resellers/SMB engagers such as ReachLocal, Yodle, WebVisible, Orange Soda and Clickable.

Other groups, such as AdReady and PaperG, have acted as agencies for clients as they provide local “versioning” for them. Best Buy, for instance, creates different ads in Phoenix than in Miami. AdReady does a lot of versioning work with major clients such as Alaska Airlines. Vertical ad networks such as Adify have also gone into geo-targeting, as have media placement services companies such as Centro, which has worked with mega-advertisers such as GM on their local initiatives.

Recently, however, we’ve been seeing ambitious local initiatives at several of the large agencies. From what we can tell, the initiatives have been spurred from the client side, as national and regional clients have watched local’s momentum — or should we say “Geomentum.” Geomentum is a division of MediaBrands, which itself is owned by InterPublic Group, the third-largest advertising agency holding company. It has a nine-person leadership team, and can also draw off of MediaBrand resources.

We talked with new Geomentum President Lisa Bradner, who most recently served as a Forrester analyst. Bradner told us the problem has always been that it is so much easier to buy national. Local provides all kinds of insights and understanding about clients. But the challenge is to make it scale, she says.

Her efforts will focus on helping people understand the granular research on how/where to spend local. It is a combination of testing and measurement, she says. Whatever happens, advertisers are cutting newspaper spending, and they’re looking for new ways to reach people locally. Verticals with a strong local component such as retail, financial services and insurance will each do well out of the gate, she suggests. Consumer packaged goods and pharmaceuticals also have a local component, but “they’ll be slower to get there.”

What many advertisers want to know is how they can effectively localize their advertising from market to market — an effort that has been worked on intensively by specialists, such as Gannett’s ShopLocal. “Walgreens might lose sales in Poughkeepsie for different reasons than Santa Monica,” says Bradner.

The key is to “take it below the DMA level,” says Bradner. “You want to target the great white space between 1:1 and the DMA,” something that Bradner dubs “one to some.”

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