The latest in our series of video presentations covers the basics of location-based mobile advertising. This takes a 40K foot view of the trends impacting this opportune area.  For example, what’s driving the $4.5 billion spent annually on location targeted mobile ads?

Other Topics Covered:

— What usage patterns are having the most impact on location based advertising?
— What do we mean exactly when we say “location based mobile advertising” (examples)?
— What campaign tactics are producing the greatest results so far?
— mCommerce vs. offline shopping (spoiler: offline is where it’s at)

Check out the presentation below — a carbon copy of one I gave last week at LeadsCon. It contains streaming video of slides and voiceover. Consider it a “conversation starter” for deeper dives, and the topics at our upcoming SMB Digital Marketing conference.

The post BIA/Kelsey Video: Location Based Mobile Marketing 101 appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

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.

xAd is on a roll. The company just announced a channel sales deal with Cox Digital Solutions. This essentially puts xAd’s location based mobile ads into the bundle that Cox sells to local advertisers. It now becomes the exclusive reseller of xAd in the areas it operates.

The broad strokes are that Cox arms its local sales reps with a more appealing local ad tool. xAd gets a sales channel to distribute it’s ad product deeper in among local advertisers. For the latter, there’s also something to be said for Cox’s advertiser base that is incremental reach for xAd.

It’s also a nice fit from a product perspective. Location based mobile ads compliment Cox’s strengths in TV online display, rich media, and digital video. Broadening the cross-platform bundle for advertisers aligns with “path to purchase” usage trends that weave between different screens.

And speaking of areas where Cox operates, we’ll be holding a big conference in a little over a month in its home city of Atlanta. The topic will be national advertisers that are developing different flavors of location targeted ad strategies. This of course is germane to xAd who will be a key speaker.

We’ll unpack this further at the conference and more terms of the xAd/Cox partnership can be seen in the press release. There are lots of other interesting ways the two companies will be working together. Lastly, here is a video we filmed after xAd’s recent data release.

The post xAd Goes Deeper into Local With Cox appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

During my travels over the past week (AdTech NY and Qualcomm’s LTE Direct Summit) the same idea came up a few times which started to make me think.  Could all of the signals emanating from mobile device (see “big data meets local“) unlock better local yield management?

In other words, could knowing how far away someone is to a business — and several other variables — enable predictive modeling about their probability of transacting. This isn’t necessarily new but takes on new flavors if worked into an equation that defines their price sensitivity or elasticity?

From there, it becomes clear about offering different pricing to existing customers, repeat customers, faraway customers, nearby customers, customers with green eyes and love of craft beer, etc. This gets us closer to mobile’s promise of more effectively driving offline commerce.

It’s especially relevant within the context of perishable inventory (think empty movie theater or restaurant). This is of course nothing new, and gets to the yield management endgame of the daily deals craze of 2010-2011. But continuing advancements in big data push it further.

It boils down to segmenting consumers by willingness to pay for something — a function of location-oriented factors like weather, behavior, time, product category, etc. This makes it a juiced up version of the airline model that maximizes revenue with demand-driven variable pricing.

Groupon’s mobile efforts take this to heart. There’s also Thinknear (situational targeting), xAd (Smartfences) and Retailigence (local product availability). These each reveal variable demand, impacted by location-related variables and time. The next phase is optimizing pricing accordingly.

This will all be at the center of a lot of the things we continue to look at and write about at the intersection of mobile, social, local and big data. The emerging world of mobile shopping and payments (subject of my recent report), is central to all of this. Stay tuned for more.

The post Could Mobile Bring Airfare-Style Pricing To Local Commerce? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

It’s hard work distilling 20,000 people, hundreds of sessions, droves of start-ups, seemingly endless parties and even a Mike Tyson cameo into a cliffs notes recap of SxSW Interactive. Not that anyone is shedding any tears for me. America loves lists (or so I’ve heard), so here are “the big ideas” that have my brain buzzing post-Austin.

1) The Check-In Gets an Ego Check: Kudos to Gowalla’s Josh Williams, cofounder of a company that has leveraged check-in fascination to fund and fertilize the business, for reminding the location-based services space that check-ins were originally designed as means to greater value, not as ends unto themselves. When misconstrued, badges, passport stamps and other social rewards that fail to tell a more compelling value story (whether tangible, personal, philanthropic or other) can become a hindrance rather than a facilitator. “We’re drinking our own Kool-Aid,” Williams admonished.

So what does “getting real” really mean? Not a lot of concrete nuggets were offered. Perhaps it’s being able to tell a larger, more colorful personal and social narrative around places you’ve been or communities you’ve interacted with (the Gowalla idea). Maybe it’s about social recommendations that blend local places with friends’ activity (hello Foursquare). Maybe it’s gamification for larger social good (see Seth Priebatsch’s grand plan to use game mechanics to fix education). Or maybe its something else. But it’s not check-ins … not long-term, at least.

2) So, This Whole Deal-a-Day Thing May Be MUCH Bigger Than We Thought: Actually, many of my colleagues have viewed group buying as a local commerce game changer since its earliest days. But the deals session at SxSW, particularly a slide from Yipit’s Jim Moran, brought this burgeoning ecosystem into sharper relief.

I’m well aware of the critical places that deals sites, white-label providers, verticals and aggregators hold and can feel the rising demand for data to justify the opportunity for publishers. Exchanges were a natural as the space grew. But there is also real potential in merchant services, consumer services and merchant agencies. These are largely new doors to be unlocked. There may be more opportunity in b-to-b deals as well, where promising rollouts are limited (Business Insiders’ Pipeline, for one).

The next nuts to crack: better merchant care to boost customer retention, self serve that’s truly accessible (Groupon’s merchant center hasn’t exactly caught fire) and, for publishers, tighter integration of deals into brand content (not as blunt ad units).

3) Won’t You Be My Neighbor?: Maybe, if I knew where the neighborhood started and stopped. Much of the future of the mobile-social intersection hinges on definitions of, and ability to utilize, location. Sounds mushy, huh?

To paraphrase NeighborGoods CEO Micki Krimmel, technology has been great for building affinity and interest groups, but can it be equally useful in fostering local connections? Foursquare and others are beginning down this path with their location + social recommendation engine, but the layer that NabeWise CEO Ann Baldinucci says is missing is the one that “sits above property listings and addresses to tell you what a community or neighborhood is all about.” That is the context wrapper that is largely absent.

Joe Stump from SimpleGeo noted that the demand for neighborhood-level data is fervent, but limited in its application if no social context is connected to it.

4) Twitter Saves Linear TV!: Well, maybe not singularly save it, but it certainly can provide a boost. Chloe Sladden, Twitter’s Director of Media Partnerships, shared anecdotal evidence that integrating second screen activity with live, linear event programming can enhance the real-time appeal of a show (i.e., DVR can’t replicate the dynamic social experience users have when connecting over a live show).

Interestingly, Gavin Purcell, the supervising producer of “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” foresees a new job title growing around second screen experiences. Essentially, this person will extend the role of the community manager cross-platform to connect big screen and second screen interaction.

Many local broadcasters are already effectively utilizing Twitter in their newscasts by soliciting audience questions and surfacing story ideas. Now, can they extend the experience to a second screen to create more dynamic conversation?

The post SxSW Wrap-Up: ‘The Big Ideas’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

SCVNGR “chief ninja” Seth Priebatsch and Gowalla CEO Josh Williams both employ game mechanics to elevate their location-based services, and both believe that gaming’s inherent fun factor can motivate more important behaviors, including social good. But that’s where the similarities stop.

The duo delivered keynote addresses at SxSW Interactive, Priebatsch in front of 4,000, Williams in front of a smaller crowd is his company’s backyard (figuratively — Gowalla is Austin-based).

Priebatsch’s thesis essentially reads like this: The construction of the social ecosystem is largely complete; “the framework has been decided.” It’s called Facebook. The next decade will not be about building digital plumbing or social connections, but gaming the established architecture to “traffic social influence.” SCVNGR uses this game dynamic to drive its users to complete location-centric challenges.

The 22-year-old, a proud Princeton dropout donning PU-orange shades, proceeded to offer examples of powerful game mechanics in action, as well as broken processes that gamification can remedy.

Take Groupon, for instance, as a potent example of the game layer driving customer acquisition. The deal-a-day monster has essentially fused three powerful game mechanics into a $15 billion enterprise equation: “free lunch” + communal gameplay (sharing across decentralized networks) + countdown = the deal is on!

Then there’s customer loyalty, where American Express has ingeniously leveraged “level up” game psychology to create status through card colors (gold, platinum, black). SCVNGR clearly drew motivation from this concept with its new LevelUp pilot that combines LBS with Groupon-esque discounts.

SCVNGR's Seth Priebatsch

For Priebatsch, there are no boundaries to the influence that games can wield in the social realm. For Williams, however, “gamification” (a dirty word in his book) is a means to an end. What’s that end? That’s what LBS must figure out to escape its current “purgatory.”

That purgatory, Williams noted, is the potential not only for check-in overload, but for check-ins and virtual rewards (badges, et al) to be misconstrued as endpoints rather than context wrappers for driving greater utility.

Williams’ future for LBS includes narrating personal histories, building and solidifying communities and fostering social good, though he admits that “social validation” will always be a driver (see what enabling photo posting did to mainstream Facebook).

Foursquare is the biggest pure-play LBS, with 7.5 million users. SCVNGR and Gowalla each count about 1 million. That’s an intriguing start, but far from a mainstream experience. Neither Priebatsch nor Williams had concrete ideas for how to push forward (at least none that they let on), but this much they certainly agree on: Building bolder value requires delighting users, and that must transcend temporal check-ins.

Though no cure-all solutions were put forward, these entrepreneurs’ contrasting outlooks on the future of the converged mobile-social-local universe offered a refreshing reminder that not all location services are created equal…that the space isn’t confined to just Foursquare and a flock of rewards-based followers.

Gowalla's Josh Williams

The post SxSW: The Location Wars (cont’d) — Defending and Transcending ‘The Game Layer’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

One of the principal questions in the local marketplace heading into 2011 is how location-based services (check-ins, barcode scanning) and deals will continue to synergize to create an integrated user experience? Just as important, what role will Google play?

An early clue may have turned up with SCVNGR nabbing a third round of funding, this one for $15 million. Google Ventures is a chief investor in the Boston start-up, having poured in $4 million in earlier rounds.

SCVNGR launched its geosocial rewards platform in July and expects total users to top 1 million by month’s end. LBS brands, Foursquare the highest profile among them, sell serendipity by using game mechanics to drive local discovery through check-ins. The concept generated buzz aplenty in 2010, but not as much evidence of mainstream popularity. In November, PEW reported that only 4 percent of online U.S. adults actually use these location-based tools.

SCVNGR has tried to separate itself from the Foursquare/Gowalla/Loopt crowd on a couple of fronts. It pursued paying clients first, rather than starting with simply building the user base. And its focus on challenges over virtual check-ins allows clients to elicit certain interactive behaviors from their patrons, then reward their loyalty with tangible prizes. Users of the service’s mobile apps accumulate points for completing tasks, then can redeem those points for prizes when a certain threshold (determined by the merchant) is met.

This is potentially important in two ways — steering the LBS experience away from check-in fatigue (badges and mayorships only go so far) and empowering local businesses to engage their customer base by incenting desired actions. Some have called this a basis of the modern loyalty platform.

The fact that Google is backing SCVNGR is, if nothing else, eyebrow-raising. The big G has put a heavy emphasis on local AND location. It unveiled Places, built Place Search around it, then added Tags so small businesses could use their Places pages for tailored promotions. Now there’s Product Search, which we assume Google will attempt to scale across Places to show display real-time inventory, price comparisons and more. All of these have big connections to mobile enterprise.

It also deployed its search chief, Marissa Mayer, to head up local. In a recent interview with Mediabistro, Mayer noted that deals and offers are areas that Google can increasingly leverage, positioning it to compete with Groupon (and other deals sites) after a failed acquisition bid. SCVNGR is an early mover in melding location and deals together for the mobile consumer.

Google has long been on a scavenger hunt for viable social platforms. Could SCVNGR be one of them (literally)?

The post Check-In Service SCVNGR Has New Funding … From Google appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

So why do people check in? Is it, as Gowalla’s Andy Ellwood jokingly suggested, because “I am in my 20s and you should just care where I am”? Or are the reasons more substantial?

This afternoon’s panel on location-based services focused on why and how users engage with LBS (check-ins).

Gillian Heltai of comScore said the firm’s research data show that most consumers are either comfortable or at worst ambivalent about disclosing their location on services like Facebook, Foursquare and Gowalla.

The comScore survey showed that 44 percent of consumers want to know where their friends are, while 37 percent were comfortable disclosing their own location. A minority were opposed to doing so.

Heltai said that when you project out smartphone penetration three years (when we are expected to reach 50 percent penetration), there is the potential for 87 million mobile social users by 2013.

She said use of location-based services will be “driven by device proliferation and the availability of content.”

She said current data show that check-in services (Facebook Places) today are used heavily by younger males (63 percent aged 18-34 and 60 percent male).

Gowalla’s Ellwood said the reason consumers use check-ins and social media in general is because people like to “tell stories about their lives.” That may be a bit self-involved, but it is more substantial than the running cliche about tweeting that you just put grape jelly on your toast.

So checking in at a restaurant, pub or charity event helps advance that personal narrative. Check-ins at more mundane stops (the dry cleaner) are much less common.

Ellwood talked about how Gowalla is working with some very well-known brands to leverage the check-in phenomenon to engage with customers and build their brands.

One example is the Sundance Film Festival, which is using Gowalla to help solve the problem many festival goers suffer — an experience overload that leads to a rather sketchy memory of what they did at the festival.

So Gowalla built a program that allows Sundancers to check in at every screening party and receive a stamp that will leave a digital trail of what they did at the festival.

The post ILM:10: Checking In on Location-Based Services appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Evidently, the popular adoption — or lack thereof — of location-based applications and services may simply be a function of whom you talk to. JiWire asked the on-the-go audience that it serves ads to across public Wi-Fi networks, and the holiday outlook for LBS is markedly sunnier than the dimmer results recently released by PEW.

In a sample of its tech-enthusiast users for its Q3 2010 Mobile Audience Insights Report, JiWire returned that an astounding 89 percent of respondents are likely to use location-based tools this holiday season. These are the same Foursquares, Gowallas, Loopts, SCVNGRs, et al that only 4 percent of PEW’s cross-section reported using in a study published earlier this month. The key differences: JiWire’s audience is exclusively Wi-Fi (thus catering to an on-the-move crowd), with much of its wireless distribution occurring in venues such hotels and airports that skew toward higher-end demos that are heavier holiday spenders.

David Staas, JiWire’s SVP of Marketing, told BIA/Kelsey that “over the last 12 months, we’ve seen an explosion of location-oriented content that’s taking place because of consumer demand. Consumers are starting to think from a location-centric perspective.”

JiWire’s majority, 61 percent, value finding store locations above all other mobile features. Interestingly, 33 percent prefer using LBS to search the product inventory of nearby stores. This validates Google Product Places, Milo, Krillion and a host of others that are partnering with retailers to share real-time inventory, an idea founded in research that indicates that most purchases still occur in store … but nearly half of them are motivated by online research.

LBS has begun to earn a checkered name in some circles because of the gimmickiness and fatigue associated with check-ins and virtual rewards. But JiWire suggests that 49 percent of the on-the-go crowd use these capabilities. They’re checking in principally to unlock deals and promotions, not to accululate virtual capital, supporting the notion that tangible bait is pivotal to drive store traffic.

This reaffirms a previous JiWire study that showed that the majority (51 percent) of its on-the-go audience was comfortable sharing location in exchange for more relevant advertising because, as Staas said, “it’s a value exchange. They’re getting something useful back.”

Also noteworthy: 30 percent of the sampled audience is willing to travel more than five miles to redeem a mobile coupon. For all the talk of hyperlocal and geotargeting, these results affirm the importance of a different term, one that Gannett Digital Network General Manager Josh Resnik recently shared with BIA/Kelsey — “hyper-relevancy.” People will travel if offers are contextually and psychographically germane. “It’s about matching audience with location,” Staas said. “Location has different components, including marketing to the right consumer.”

So, where does the truth lie? Again, it probably depends on whom you ask, and chances are it falls somewhere in-between. By the same token, several recent announcements have the potential to mainstream LBS well beyond the walls of technophilia. Facebook Deals and Places, coupled with Google Places. Place Search, Product Search and Hotpot, run the gamut of LBS, encompassing local, social and retail.

The post JiWire Report: LBS Checks In for Christmas appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Judging by the name alone, many would think of Badgeville as just the latest in the swelling line of social gaming and check-in companies (Foursquare, Gowalla, Zynga) that promote shared online experiences through status updates and virtual currency. CEO Kris Duggan prefers to think of his product as a “modern loyalty platform for Web sites.”

Badgeville, along with similar brands (DoubleDutch), aspires to democratize the Foursquare experience beyond retail by enabling publishers and other segments to build their own game mechanics and incentives platforms. Then it wants to enrich the Foursquare experience by extending social gaming beyond geocentric sharing to a set of more complex behavioral functions (what uers are doing on the site, and what the publisher would like them to do). 

Of course, the central component of Badgeville (hence the name) is leveraging virtual reputation and reward to spur defined engagements as dictated by the publisher. The three-step process that Duggan and his team work through with prospective publishers is to first understand exactly what metrics the company wishes to measure and behaviors it wants to encourage (viewing videos, commenting on stories, etc.), then identify the audience segments that match those objectives, and finally, build out rewards-based engagement programs to achieve the set goals.

As Duggan told BIA/Kelsey, the net effect is not only incentivizing faithful users or increasing online traffic, but also developing a richer understanding of who the most loyal and active site users are, and what types of content interaction resonate with them. “Publishers can’t even tell you who their high-value users are. This isn’t just about badges and stickers, but about giving real analytics insights into the loyalty of your community.”

Aside from “mayorships” and “trophies,” that is how Duggan is positioning Badgeville — as a longer-term solution for publishers, not a get-in-the-game plug-and-play in the much-hyped realm of game mechanics. This follows Duggan’s belief in the dramatic evolution of analytics from quantity-directed metrics (UVs, PVs, CTRs) to “outcomes-oriented” measurement of the loyalty graph, allowing companies to more effectively focus on their core.

Badgeville launched in early October after winning the Audience Choice award at TechCrunch Disrupt. Recently, it went live on Philly.com with a loyalty program built around reading and commenting on articles. Duggan says his start-up currently fields a dozen clients, primarily publishers. However, it is also being received with interest from non-publisher verticals such as education, government and automotive … a sign that the mainstreaming of location-based services and social rewards programs may not be too far off. 

The company works directly with partners on a monthly service fee, not usage-based pricing, and also offers a simpler package with API access only for those that want to roll out an introductory product.

Within any conversation of social gamification, there’s always that pesky question of “check-in fatigue” when badges and buttons lose their luster. Duggan is well aware that more robust, tangible rewards are required to push forward the allure of this urban, “techy” concept.

Comcast Sports, for instance, will launch with Badgeville in the next month across all of its regional sports properties and is considering a car sweepstakes in which only those site users who have met a certain virtual reputation threshold (accrued enough points) can qualify. Comcast will also feature activities such as picking game winners and checking into stadiums from mobile phones, both of which are easy to append with real prizes.

The post Badgeville Democratizes Gamification and Check-Ins for Publishers appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.