All eyes are on Facebook when it comes to localized marketing. This was pronounced in the company’s recent revelation that 40 million SMBs now have active Pages (2 million advertise). And BIA/Kelsey’s own survey data indicate that social is the most prevalent marketing channel.

The biggest drivers for this according to Czaja are reach and targeting. More than 1 billion people use Facebook daily, the vast majority via mobile.  As for targeting, it’s more accurate on Facebook than most other digital media he asserted. This involves lots of granular audience profiling.

“We’re talking about real people and not cookies,” he said, adding that businesses can enhance targeting by “bringing their own data onto Facebook” for retargeting. FB can also target look-alike audiences with similar characteristics to a brand’s existing customers or target audience.

The full session video is below.

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Here we are in the middle of National Small Business Week, which seems like a great time to unveil the agenda and key themes of our upcoming SMB conference, which happens Sept. 29-30 at the Marriott Denver Tech Center. This event helps companies understand what makes SMBs tick so they can more successfully build and sell digital marketing solutions for small-business advertisers.

We are bringing a new look and feel to this year’s SMB conference — a faster pace, deeper audience engagement, a much more tactical focus and truly candid conversations about what it really takes to win in this exciting and challenging space.

​The preliminary SMB 2015 agenda reads as a road map of the most exciting opportunities and vexing challenges facing the local SMB digital marketing ecosystem. Keep an eye here as we add VIPs in the local SMBs as headline speakers, executive interview subjects and panelists.

Our Day 1 Headliner will be a joint session with Chris Terrill and Craig Smith, CEO and COO, respectively, of Home Advisor, a leader in matching home improvement leads with qualified merchants. Chris and Craig have been deep in the SMB trenches and understand what it takes to find the right business model for success in this space. Other headliners, including leaders from many of the premier SMB facing brands, will be announced soon.

Here are a few of the topics we’ll tackle at SMB 2015:

Making Big Data Small Enough for SMBs
Is Location the New Local?
Programmatic for SMBs — Is This a Thing Yet?
Is There a Play for the Long Tail SMB?
We’re Not Going to Say ‘Content is King’ — But It Kinda Is
Crowdfunding and Micro-lending — The Democratization of SMB Finance?
Bringing Hollywood to Main Street — Evolutions in Video Advertising

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U.S. mobile ad revenues will grow from $13.3B last year to $42.4B by 2019. That’s according to BIA/Kelsey’s latest Local Media Forecast, released last week. The forecast is broken down into media such as online, television, and YP. Today we highlight the mobile piece.

The mobile projections above include search, display, SMS, video and native social (i.e. Facebook news feed ads). The latter are the fastest growing mobile ad format. It’s also important to note that these figures do not include tablets (for reasons mentioned here).

In addition to ad formats, the mobile ad pie can be segmented by targeting scope: Location targeted mobile ad spend will grow from $4.3 billion last year to $18.2 billion in 2019. That equals about a third of overall mobile ad revenues, growing to 42 percent by 2019.

Drivers for this growth include mobile usage (which skews towards local intent) and advertiser evolution to follow that usage. Another important factor is the premiums associated with location targeted ads, which result from performance and growing demand.

We’ll release more data soon that drills down further into the mobile numbers and many inputs. Also expect more from the forecast’s other media types as we unpack them here and at upcoming conferences. Meanwhile the mobile highlights are below.

— U.S. location-targeted mobile ad revenues are projected to grow from $4.3 billion in 2014 to $18.2 billion in 2019 (34 percent CAGR).
— This is defined as mobile advertising targeted based on a user’s location; or including proximity-relevant content to trigger local offline conversions.
— It includes large national advertisers and SMBs.

— National advertisers continue to drive the majority of localized mobile ad revenues
— Innovation among ad networks and ad tech providers (e.g., Google, xAd) will accelerate this draw to location targeted mobile ads.
— SMB adoption — a slow but growing share of localized mobile advertising — will likewise impact revenue.
— BIA/Kelsey sees evolving SMB savvy and propensity to self serve with offerings like Google AdWords and Facebook (pull).
— Local media companies will also accelerate adoption through innovation, sales and bundling efforts (push).

— Localized mobile ad share will also grow as a result of premium ad rates.
— Premiums will result mostly from higher performance (i.e., CTRs, phone calls, store visits).
— Performance deltas are in turn a function of:
— Higher relevance, immediacy and alignment with consumer local buying intent, all of which are more prevalent in mobile than in other digital and print media.
— For example, half of mobile searches have intent to find local information or products, compared to the 20 percent of desktop searches that carry comparative local intent.
— Advertisers increasingly include calls-to-action to capture this high local intent (i.e. in-unit click-to-call buttons).

Read More…

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Despite all of the excitement around location based mobile advertising, the dirty little secret is that it’s tempered by the accuracy of the location signal… which is often wildly inaccurate.

Following our podcast with ThinNear founder and former CEO Eli Portnoy, we had the chance to catch up with Hilary Maitland at BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL last month to discuss the firm’s latest Location Score Index.

“When an app creates advertising calls, they can [report] location to however many decimals of accuracy they want,” said Maitland. “That location can come from multiple sources.So if you want to be accurate, you have to understand where that location data is coming from and is it actually where you’re stated.”

More importantly we looked at a few ThinkNear case studies of what can be expected when location is done right. There are clear performance deltas between good and bad practices. This follows our similar discussion with xAd’s Dan Hight about what some of those best practices look like.

The video is embedded below and we’ll have lots more on this topic in ongoing coverage of location-based mobile advertising.

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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.

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Location based mobile advertising accounts for about one third of overall U.S. mobile ad revenues, and quickly growing. In addition to the topic emerging in nearly every session at last week’s BIA/Kelsey NATIONAL, we held two dedicated sessions to drill down on its particulars.

One of those sessions was my portion of our opening analyst presentations to spotlight the top areas we’re currently examining. Though the conference video will be available soon, I’ve filmed a screen recording (slides and audio voiceover) of the presentation.

See the 10 minute video embedded below. This will be an important jumping off point for the continued discussion around location based mobile marketing — especially for national brands localizing campaigns with various flavors of mobile ad targeting.

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Selling National Accounts for Local Targeting

Travis Arthur, VP of Partner and Strategic Accounts, ReachLocal
Rick Hanna, CEO, Mspark
Corey O’Donnell, VP Marketing, Brand Networks, Yodle

Yodle’s O’Donnell said, “The big challenge for network businesses is to get rock stars to act like choir boys.” O’Donnell was referring to the challenge of getting individual dealer or franchise locations to cooperate with national marketing efforts.

Reach Local’s Arthur positions the company as a variation on SaaS. It’s Software with a service, he says, with a heavy emphasis on the service part: “A platform is table stakes. Consistency is a key point of difference.”

Mspark’s Hanna: “Some players have brands strictly controlled at corporate. Others give more leeway to franchisees.”

Arthur: “ReachLocal is launching in-app mobile advertising for our customers. I think there is a play for the services space to serve up coupons, etc.”

Hanna: “When you are calling on your customers, don’t be surprised they are not anywhere near where they should be.”

O’Donnell: “The term mobile is a misnomer. The print to digital shift is a large formula. It’s like a meal, you need an entree, appetizer and drinks. Mobile is just part of part of that formula… “I also have a distaste for the word ‘national.’ There is a 100:1 ration between searches for small discreet hearing aid v searches for miracle ear. Most spend happens locally.”

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In local media and advertising, “National” is increasingly where it’s at. Though paradoxical in a semantic sense, it stands to reason if you consider the deeper pockets and more technologically adaptive nature of national brands, compared to SMBs.

This is especially true for multi-location businesses such as chain restaurants or retail. Though they’re national in scale, they compete at the local level where conversions happen. We’ve reported that national brand spending will represent 43 percent of location based advertising by 2018.

This involves an evolving set of campaign components including mobile, social, search, listings management, etc.. These strategies are are endemic to local marketing but take unique forms for the nuances of multi-location businesses and how they’re oriented.

We’ve covered this “National” area of local marketing for years but began to formalize that coverage last year. Now we’re blitzing the topic even more, with the upcoming National conference in March in Dallas. And today’s white paper is the latest.

The report’s executive summary is below and BIA/Kelsey clients can read the entire thing by logging into the client portal. Anyone else interested in the full report, please email me (mbolandATbiakelsey.com).

Executive Summary

Smart phones now account for 75 percent of mobile subscriptions according to BIA/Kelsey. Stemming from their evolving capabilities (i.e. location awareness, connectivity, optics), location targeted mobile advertising continues its rapid ascent. BIA/Kelsey projects it to reach $19 billion in the U.S. this year.

Google supports these findings, reporting that 80 percent of smartphone owners search for local information, and 80 percent of those users want ads customized to their locale. Moreover, 73 percent of mobile searches result in conversions (such as calling a business). Half of those happen within one hour.

BIA/Kelsey forecast data and insights likewise indicate that mobile users are “high intent” customers who often have a sense of immediacy (read: ready to buy). Correspondingly, mobile ad networks confirm performance deltas — such as higher click through rates and phone calls — for location targeted ads.

But the emergence of mobile has also made advertising more complex as the technology and consumer behavior evolve. For example, advertisers’ affinity for proof of ROI and attribution is technically difficult when consumer decision-making happens across several devices including desktop, tablet and mobile.

This challenge is amplified for national companies that must align brand messages with local presence. Those localized entities include retail partners, franchisees, distributors, and affiliates. This makes it difficult to achieve consistent messaging and service levels across geographically disparate entities.

These challenges are highlighted by the size of the market opportunity: National brand spending will represent 43 percent of location based advertising by 2018 according to BIA/Kelsey. That’s about $68 billion — an amount that makes multi-location marketing strategies increasingly critical.

Some of the areas where these strategies will focus include social media, listings management, ratings and reviews, search engine optimization, and of course, mobile. This report examines each of these areas and their impact on multi-location advertising in the mobile age.

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Following our post about Facebook’s next moves in mobile, today it launched its mobile ad network at the f8 conference. As expected by many, this will be an “off-site” network that applies Facebook’s audience targeting to third party apps. It will be called the Facebook Audience Network (FAN).

Ad targeting will presumably be linked through Facebook Connect, so it will shine among apps that use that utility. As we speculated last week, this could grow even greater relevance if authentication and user tracking happens among apps that apply social sign-in at the OS level.

Some of the other features announced today that we called right:

— The ad network will include mostly app install ads at the onset, which have been a cash cow for Facebook.

— Format options will mostly be banners and interstitials, as opposed to the (native) news feed ads that Facebook applies on its own app.

— More native ad formats — those that merge with a given app’s content format — will develop over time, but only through direct relationship with Facebook (presumably limited to the largest campaigns and ad spend).

— The ad targeting factors will be mostly behavioral, as linked to your Facebook activity and profile (per the point above).

— Location targeting tied to the new Friend Finder feature is not included, as many speculated it would. As we explored last week, that is something completely different, but potentially coming later to FAN.

Overall, the big story here is that this will allow Facebook to grow mobile revenues while fulfilling it’s core goal of not over-commercializing it’s flagship app. It tried versions of this approach a few times but the timing is now right for lots of reasons. Quoting our analysis last week:

“But ultimately the beauty of an off-site network is to use all of this data and positioning to continue milking demand for mobile ads, without killing the cow. Instead of over-monetizing its own core user experience, it can do so in someone else’s back yard (albeit with a publisher rev share).”

There will be lots yet to unfold here and we’ll continue covering it closely, including at our big Leading in Local conference in Atlanta next week. We still have discount codes if you’re on the fence (email me at mbolandATbiakelsey.com). Hope to see you there.

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