BIA/Kelsey is partnering again with the Local Media Association to produce this year’s LMA Native Advertising Interactive Summit next July 15-16 in Washington, DC where we’ll share our latest native ad forecast, insights about marketplace dynamics and trend lines of how we’re seeing this sector evolve. (Note early bird discounts offered through June 15th). The plan overall is to offer a mix of data, best practices, hands-on workshops and take-home ideas for getting your native ad business into higher gear.

The program covers a lot of ground in just a day and half. Nancy Lane, LMA president kicks things off with white board session where she’ll be joined by several other speakers to Schurz Communications’ Kerry Oslund, VP of Publishing and Emerging Media, will share a disruptive new approach to native advertising they’re finding to be successful. Of course, Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post has done a lot of innovation around brands and native advertising as we’ll hear from Kelly Andresen, Director of the WP BrandStudio & Planning who will share winning case studies. You’ll hear speakers from Advance, Gatehouse, Desert Digital and Dispath among others discussion pricing and packaging native ad campaigns, content strategies, outsourcing, selling native effectively and since it’s Washington, we’ll also hear from Laura Sullivan, a staff attorney with the Federal Trade Commission who’s following native closely.

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Fifty plus industry leaders will grace the stage at Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing Sept. 22-24 in New Orleans. We’re looking forward to a great show. Want to do some research before the event? Here’s some recent BIA/Kelsey blog coverage of the featured speakers (Click on the hyperlinks).

Acxiom: Scott Howe, CEO (Keynote, Day 2)

Alignable: Eric Groves, CEO (Future Stars, Day 2)

Booker: Josh McCarter, CEO (Scheduling ,Day 2)

Facebook: Joe DeVoy, Product Manager, Local Ads, Facebook (Social Media Shift, Day 2)

First Data/Perka: Mike Lazarro, Head of Planning (Beyond Advertising, Day 3)

ForwardLine: Craig Coleman, CEO (Cultivating SMB Success, Day 2)

Groupon: Dan Roarty, VP, Product Development (Keynote, Day 2)

Local Media Association: Nancy Lane, President (Local Media Heavy Hitters, Day 3)

Radius: Megan Austin Karlen, VP (Smart Data, Day 2)

ReachLocal: Sharon Rowlands,CEO, (Keynote, Day 2)

SignPost: Stu Wall, CEO (Beyond Advertising, Day 3)

Verve: Tom Kenney, President (Brass Tacks Mobile, Day 2)

Wanderful Media: Doug Kilponen, COO (SMB Retail, Day 2)

Yelp: Darnell Holloway, Sr. Mgr., Community Outreach (SMBs On Stage with Yelp, Day 1); Peter Curzon, Business Development ( Brass Tracks Mobile, Day 2)

YP: Jeff Federman, SVP, Digital (Brass Tacks Mobile, Day 2)

The post Useful Research for New Orleans: Recent Blog Coverage, SMB Digital Marketing Speakers appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

During the first half of Local Media Association‘s Native Advertising Summit the obvious and frequently asked question of how exactly to define native advertising was the first topic to be addressed.

Native advertising sets itself apart from other types of advertising because it is “naturally embedded into a site’s content stream and, while clearly marked as an advertisement, is found to be more impactful than banner ads,” says Ron Josey, summit key note speaker and Managing Director at JMP Securities.  Or as Todd Handy from Deseret Digital Media put it, “it is in the content, engaging, and highly shareable.”

Once the “what” was established, next came the “how.” How does one participate in native advertising effectively? According to David Arkin, VP of Content at GateHouse Media, there are three overarching content goals when it comes to native advertising: it needs to make readers smarter, connect with them emotionally or offer them a solution for a problem.

So how do we accomplish these goals? Arkin answered this question with another list, First you need to establish a focus for your brand (articles, social posts, their site, your site, etc.). Then it is essential for the content to meet the standards of your newsroom. Quality is key. It is also important to produce interesting content that goes beyond the business profile and Q&A — it is not an advertorial. Finally, you need to work with a great company to help you accomplish all of this.

Now that we understand what native advertising is and have a pretty good idea of how to do it, the big question is, why do it? To put it bluntly: because it is effective. “Native ads have ten times the click through rate of traditional display ads,” says Josey, and “32 percent of native ads are shared as opposed to only 19 percent of banner ads.”

With stats like that native advertising is likely to explode in the future.

To learn more about native advertising and content marketing in general, check out BIA/Kelsey‘s latest insight paper Content Marketing: The New SMB Paradigm.

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When a traditional media executive visits Google, Facebook and other tech leaders, there is always a lot of oohing and ahhing and a bit of envy.

You can’t help but notice the great perks, such as free dry cleaning and gourmet food. Add to that their relative transparency; open seating that bust out the cubicles; first name relationships with the executive team; grand vision statements that go beyond profit; the distribution of company equity; and their trust in employees.

But these tech perks have been around now for years (and copied.) What are the real revelations that traditional media company executives can gain from a tour of tech leaders, circa 2014? That’s the question posed by The Local Media Association’s Fifth “Innovation Mission,” a six day, multi-city adventure that included on site briefings at tech and media leaders such as Google, eBay, LinkedIn, The New York Times, Buzzfeed, CBS Local, Gatehouse Media, Automattic, RussMedia and others

BIA/Kelsey spoke on last year’s tour, and we have been eager to see the report from this year’s edition. Here’s the summary: The new wave is all about sharing media; the widespread use of mobile has given rise to omnichannel publishing; and the next wave of internal communications and news gathering is quickly moving from email to messaging.

The tour’s focus on shareable media especially caught our attention. BuzzFeed – which gets 23 million of its 57 million daily views from shared posts –goes so far as to say that share data has become “the most important metric.” The report says this about Buzzfeed: “As ideas surface, they ask themselves: ‘would you share this with your friends?’ For Buzzfeed, share data is seen as a stronger indicator of audience engagement than HuffPo-like “click bait” that fools you into checking out an article, but doesn’t ultimately engage you.

What drives sharing? For BuzzFeed, the biggest driver of shared media has been YouTube; but Pinterest is #2 – much more impactful than live media such as Twitter. Facebook is also a big driver, although its impact is not immediate: it takes several days to build.

Is Buzzfeed’s relentless focus on shared media an apples-to-apples “best practice” for traditional media companies? Probably not. After all, it says its real focus is grabbing people who are “bored in line, bored at work and bored at home.” (One of its biggest traffic drivers is Miley Cyrus.) Still, as mobile’s share of media usage gains, and “boredom breaks” pre-dominate, there are definite lessons in studying its model.

The LMA Innovation Mission Report can be purchased here.

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No one media organization has completely solved the challenge of traditional to digital sales transformation — but there is an emerging set of common traits and best practices. On Tuesday, we presented some of these elements on a Local Media Association webinar, “Taming the Local Sales Machine.”

The webinar presentation was based on a talk Jed Williams and I gave in February at the Key Executives Mega-Conference in Las Vegas. The conference was a joint effort of the LMA and the Inland Press Association.

To prepare, Jed and I spoke with several local sellers, including newspapers (given the audience) and pure plays, to find out what was working and not working in local sales transformation.

The result was a set of “Common Traits of Successful Sellers” spelled out in the image below. These traits are not all present in all successful sellers, but most of those getting traction in the local marketplace share most of these traits. If we were to pick one that was an absolute requirement it would be “Leadership Commits.” Without this, transformation efforts are dead in the water.

The webinar also shared a few “Actionable Ideas for Sales Transformation” that we picked up in the course of our interviews. These include methods for enforcing accountability, using data to drive sales efficiency and using sales prep platforms to convince buyers they need to keep pace with their competition. We will summarize all of these findings in a Briefing for BIA/Kelsey clients.

Those who missed the webinar can access a replay on the LMA archive.

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