Big media brands like Gannett, Living Social, Weather.com and YP will take center stage next month at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local: The National Impact conference in Atlanta.

We asked BIA/Kelsey Managing Director Rick Ducey to talk about the messages big media brands will have for national brands looking to localize their marketing efforts. One element that stands out is media brands’ ability to generate compelling local content.

“National marketers have become very enamored with this notion of of native or content advertising,” Ducey said. “If you can get content that is sourced locally and targeted to a local venue, that is very engaging from a consumer perspective.”

Watch the video below to hear Rick talk about the role of national media brands at the conference, which takes place May 7-9 in Atlanta.

Next week we will dig deeper into big media brands, interviewing Curt Hecht, Chief Global Revenue Officer at the Weather Company, which operates The Weather Channel and weather.com. Hecht will be the Day 2 morning keynote speaker at Leading in Local: The National Impact.

BIA/Kelsey’s Mike Boland riffed on Weather.com’s local nature in a recent Local Media Watch blog post.

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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.

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Living Social CEO and co-founder Tim O’Shaughnessy announced today on the company blog that he is stepping down. He will stay until a new CEO is found and installed — a process that he “hopes” will be completed during the first half of 2014. O’Shaughnessy previously worked at AOL, and transformed Living Social from its origins as a book review site.

O’Shaughnessy’s departure follows Groupon founder’s Andrew Mason’s departure last year, and marks an end of the founder’s era in the prepaid deal space. While we believe that prepaid deals are now a permanent part of the local marketing arsenal, the question remains whether there is a real future for the pioneer companies as they morph their models from high commission daily deals to shopping arcades, local targeting and business services.

Many, of course, have written off Living Social as a viable entity. The company sustained massive losses of $650 million in 2012 and $499 Million in 2011. Moreover, in a major loss of faith, Amazon wrote off most of its investment in the company. At the end of 2012, The Wall Street Journal cheekily suggested that it was one of the brands that would surely go extinct during the year.

Besides the losses, which were largely attributable to an expensive sales infrastructure, the company suffered major issues in 2013, including executive turnover; a multiple day outage; and having all its customers passwords hacked.

The company may choose to brand or merge with another entity that wants a head start in this space, such as a bank. But we see signs of life in many respects, including a deeper focus on mining their customer lists; efforts to morph beyond daily deals to coupons and other factors leading to deeper merchant relationships; mobile-oriented service, such as card linked offers; an enhanced focus on national advertising; retailer ties with companies such as Pier1 Imports, Macy’s, Reebok and OfficeMax ; and a pruning of unproven business areas, such as local events.

Last year, the company raised $110 million — including funds from many of its longtime investors –to get over the bumps. It also got additional money by selling South Korea’s T-Mon service for $260 Million to Groupon, and closed or sold several other international properties.

As O’Shaughnessy notes in his letter: “We now have the most stable and healthy business that we have ever had, and the luxury of having hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank to take us to the next level.”

We have more commentary on Living Social in this recent article by Steven Overly in The Washington Post.

Living Social CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy

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Living Social has won a lifeline from some of its existing investors today with a new infusion of $110 Million. The new cash lets the #2 deals company, which has been 31 percent owned by Amazon, proceed after sustaining very large, unsustainable losses. (It isn’t clear whether Amazon participated in the new raise).

The new investment suggests that the investors aren’t ready to toss in the towel yet on an investment once valued at $4.5 Billion. There is, in fact, a lot for Living Social to grow on. Despite the bad press that has accumulated in the space – including a recent round of layoffs — Living Social has been experiencing revenue growth, with a 32 percent increase in 4Q 2012 over 3Q 2012.

The new cash will allow the company to continue its efforts to get to profitability and outgrow its original daily deal business model. Newer lines of business include national deals; curated travel packages and classes; goods; mobile “instant” offers”; and small business services, including loyalty and engagement programs.

Living Social has done especially well with national deals, for instance, and now has a steady base of national offers that it runs. It has also invested heavily in online food ordering services.

For us, the two questions are: how much time does it have before the investors lose patience? And is the company positioned well against newer entrants in the promotions space such as American Express, Google, (and yes..,Amazon.) It is certainly one of local’s biggest bets.

Living Social SVP of National Sales Mitch Spolan, a longtime industry sales leader, is a featured speaker at Leading in Local in Boston March 18-20.

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LivingSocial, in a battle with Groupon and other deal providers to gain (and keep) market share, lost an eye popping $558 million beyond its $245 million in net earnings, according to a regulatory filing by Amazon.com, which owns 31 percent of the company. The filing was written about in today’s Washington Post.

The Post article notes that LivingSocial has 4,900 employees and claims more than 60 million members worldwide in 647 markets across 25 countries. Its vouchers grossed $750 million.

Here are the accounting details. Its vouchers grossed $750 million, giving LivingSocial net earnings of $245 million. It had operating expenses of $686 million. It also had other expenses associated with various acquisitions and stock compensation of $117 million, resulting in the $558 million loss.

In our view, companies such as LivingSocial (and Zynga and Groupon et al) aren’t really tied to earning immediate profits. The gamble is whether their massive spending leads to building a solid foundation for growth — and profits — going forward.

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Amazon’s a sleeper bet to really shake up local commerce. But what does that look like? For sure, we see the pieces being assembled…the focus on Amazon Stores, the $175 million LivingSocial investment, the Kindle Fire rollout, the expansion of Amazon Prime to include access to a range of content, the build-up of Amazon Transactions. But it isn’t totally clear — perhaps not to Amazon, either.

To us, we’re looking at local being organically integrated into general commerce, rather than ghettoized. But we keep returning to LivingSocial. And to the Prime membership model. Today, we see it more clearly.

As he was checking out a Blue Nile Cyber Monday deal on LivingSocial, Washington Business Journal reporter Bill Flook uncovered a possible new direction: a premium LivingSocial membership model being branded as “LivingSocial Plus Beta.”

For $20 a month, members would receive $25 in Deal Bucks and for the first time, a chance to break into some expired deals (“priority access to closed deals”).

For LivingSocial, the membership opportunity is clear: It can guarantee at least one purchase a month from well-heeled consumers (Blue Nile is a diamond site). Deal-a-day participants currently purchase about four deals a year. Moreover, while they are giving away $5 of credits a month, the actual cost is much less since LivingSocial only needs to come up with the commission amount before the discount.

What’s interesting to us is that LivingSocial might be going in this direction, and that its points and rewards program that it recently announced with Next Jump isn’t part of the equation. Maybe it’s hedging its bets.

Will premium memberships be the new “first class” for consumers, and especially local consumers? If that’s the case, it has great ramifications for sites not only like LivingSocial and the deals space, but Amazon, and Angie’s List, too. We’ll see how much it catches on in 2012.

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Groupon’s greatly reduced IPO is apparently set to take place on Friday, Nov. 4, in an environment much less friendly than originally envisioned last spring.

The bloom has come off for a number of reasons. Groupon has almost no barriers to entry and has had to contend with dozens and dozens of copy cats — apparently 600 at the peak. The glut of services has led to consumer and merchant overload (including lower commissions in some cases), and perhaps fatigue.

The result is that “the fastest growing company ever” appears to have slowed down and perhaps even declined in its core daily deals business, per Yipit Data.

Groupon’s evident slowdown may have helped the company run through two short-lived COOs — a very unusual situation prior to an IPO. The unorthodox distribution of its last round of funding to its initial investors also appeared to signal an internal lack of confidence in the company, greed or both.

The same could be said for the unusual accounting method in the initial S-1 leading to the IPO, which sought to downplay the company’s marketing costs in the U.S. and especially abroad. These have, in part, caused the company to be heavily in the red.

At the same time, new tools and platform products that would extend Groupon’s relationships with SMBs, specifically GrouponNow instant deals, which are mobile-oriented, have had slow ramp-ups. They’ve only had a nominal impact on the bottom line.

Again, per Yipit Data, Groupon Now resulted in less than $1 million in net revenues from May to September — although results will be bolstered now that the product is offered in 25 markets and achieves greater penetration. Other new products such as Groupon Goods, Groupon Live and Groupon Getaways have had promising results, but are not yet strong enough to bet the company’s future.

Groupon’s troubles have not been suffered in isolation. They’ve had a trickle down effect on other deals companies. Most notably, BuyWithMe, the No. 3 or No. 4 player in the space, was unable to raise money in the wake of Groupon’s problems, and has apparently been forced to sell at a fire sale price to Gilt Groupe, which may now grab its technology, lists and some of its sales force — even though GiltCity currently operates as a slightly different “flash sales” site. Groupon’s problems have also apparently caused LivingSocial, the No. 2 player, to put off its own IPO plans.

Is it all bad for Groupon and the deals space? Of course not. Groupon continues to have a basically sound business. In the last quarter, it cut off most of its marketing dollars with little apparent impact on its business. This is what we’d expect. Groupon is not a new movie, and it doesn’t need to be constantly marketed.

Groupon also continues to leads the deals segment in virtually every market it is in. Its product lineup is increasingly promising too. At the same time, we see validation in the model by the major investments in the deals space being made by Google, AT&T and Amazon (but not Facebook or Yelp).

In our view, the big money may have been nice for the early investors — although they found their own path to getting paid back. Strategically, the $25 billion valuation was largely a yoke around Groupon’s neck. At a sharply reduced valuation of perhaps $12 billion — still twice the $6 billion offered by Google last winter — the company will now have a chance to grow its set of tools and platforms more organically…and, to a certain extent, in its own sweet time.

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A new partnership between Clear Channel and LivingSocial is seeking to leverage the power of on-air personalities on 500 Clear Channel radio stations. The personalities will rap about the deals in unscripted segments. It would be interesting to know what the split is for something like this. The arrangement is described as a “commission.”

We know that on-air mentions by radio personalities provide a lift for websites and e-commerce — especially for things that have urgency requirements, such as events. But there hasn’t really been much cross-over between the two channels.

Many station groups, however, are adding deals and other offers to their websites. BogoPod, for instance, leverages a local radio show for mentions. Similarly, Cumulus Media has developed its own daily deal site, Sweetjack. That service will be live in 18 markets by the end of 2012. On a much broader basis, CBS Local stations push out deals powered by BluLabel. But we aren’t sure they have been pushing them with on-air mentions.

ClearChannel CEO Bob Pittman is the opening keynoter at ILM West Dec. 12-14 in San Francisco.

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Groupon got a flying jump investing in overseas properties that have basically cloned its daily deal concept and set up local operations. International now accounts for 54 percent of Groupon’s revenues, according to the S-1 it filed with the SEC in preparation for its IPO.

LivingSocial has not been as aggressive, mostly operating in Australia and New Zealand. But it also recently purchased Ensogo, which has operations in Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia (where it operates under the “DealKeren” brand.

Today, LivingSocial announced a deal to acquire Ticket Monster, the largest daily deal site in South Korea. “TMon,” as it is called locally, is one of more than 500 online daily deal providers in South Korea, but has about 45 percent of the market with a mixture of local deals and manufactured goods. It has more than 600 employees and earned more than $95 million in revenues in the first half of 2011. The site was launched in May 2010 and has grown 48 percent per month for the past 15 months.

In an interview with Kara Swisher at All Things D, American-educated CEO and founder Daniel Shin, 25, who was previously with a display ad company purchased by Google, said that Korea differs from the U.S. in terms of its heavy usage of e-commerce and especially location-based services. That emphasis will fit in well with LivingSocial’s recent focus on LivingSocial Walk-In Deals (and possibly, with Amazon, which has pumped $175 million into LivingSocial and is starting its own daily service).

Local services remain at the core, but “it is more than just restaurants,” said Shin. He noted that the site has 60 deals a day and is now set to expand into other parts of Asia. Earlier this year, Ticket Monster acquired Malaysia’s Everyday.com.my, a social shopping site.

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