The big announcement this morning at Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing — The Berry Company has acquired LocalVox for an undisclosed amount. Berry was already an investor in LocalVox and has been one of the leading resellers of the marketing automation firm’s LocalCast product.

Laura Cole, Berry’s VP of Marketing, told us the acquisition was important for Berry, which wanted to own its own marketing automation platform. She said the success Berry has been having in the field selling LocalCast (and its next level product, SearchCast) and LocalVox’s strong team were also determining factors. LocalVox founders Trevor Sumner and David Pachter have agreed to stay on.

LocalVox offers a platform for creating and distributing content for SMBs using a do it with me model. They are at the owned and earned vs. paid end of the media spectrum. They offer a platform that allows SMBs to efficiency distribute content across multiple platforms — websites, social media, directories, email marketing and so on.

“We have been trialing it for the past 18 months in a number of markets,” Cole said. “It’s been very successful. It is among our best performing products retention wise. To own the technology is an important step for us. We are not just sitting still.”

We also spoke with Sumner yesterday and he told us the acquisition will give LocalVox resources move the business forward.

“Berry has been very supportive,” he said. “They will invest to get us to scale.”

The Berry-LocalVox partnership dates back to late 2012, when the two companies announced a deal to offer LocalVox products through the Berry sales organization. Berry was also an investor in LocalVox before making the full acquisition, which closed last week.

Cole said Berry would not prevent LocalVox from seeking new partners and resellers under its ownership. She also said that Berry is open to addition acquisitions if they make sense.

The post This Just In: Berry Aquires LocalVox appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Last week, call tracking and analytics provider Ifbyphone announced not one, but two major milestones. First, the company announced that it has raised $30 million in series E funding — bringing its total funding to $60 million. It also announced the acquisition of call tracking provider Mongoose Metrics.

With the infusion and acquisition, we asked the company where it’s headed next.

“We will focus on what we have always done: developing the most innovative products, providing the best customer experience in the industry, and expanding our organization to support our growing list of clients,” said Steve Griffiths, Vice President of Marketing and Product Strategy at Ifbyphone. “With the Mongoose Metrics’ team at our side, we are well positioned to do so.”

The Ifbyphone platform is designed to help businesses drive, track, analyze and route phone calls to the most appropriate sales rep to convert them into revenue. The company has been providing call-based marketing technology solutions for SMBs and the agencies that serve them since its launch in 2005.

The post New Funding and Acquisition: A Conversation with Ifbyphone appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Analytics are moving center stage for many “platform” companies previously anchored in features such as maps, search, deals, store location, directions, listing updates and enhancements.

The trend — a real one — was reinforced today by Where2GetIt‘s announcement that it has acquired Brandify, the Washington D.C. area based provider of analytics for 26,000 local businesses.

Brandify provides feedback on digital marketing efforts based on 200 + variables, including reputation, local SEO performance, social engagement, competitor benchmarking, reviews and comments, business listing analysis, and locator traffic. Where2GetIt envisions Brandify “bridging the gap between its online and offline features” with “real time local insights.”

Where2GetIt CEO Manish Patel, in a discussion with BIA/Kelsey, said that many of the company’s multi-location customers — ranging from Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Shops to Hunter Douglas shades — have been asking for a more comprehensive solution.

“They are faced with knitting together a patchwork of point products and services to protect their brand, improve visibility, local listing management, and local monitoring,” said Patel. Brandify “scores” their effectiveness in key areas, and makes it easier for them to determine how effective they’ve been.

While Brandify will continue to be developed as a standalone service for small and medium businesses, it will also be integrated into Where2GetIt’s platform for national brands and multi-location services, Patel added.

Where2GetIt CEO Manish Patel is presenting a DEMO today at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local: The National Impact in Atlanta

The post Analytics Take Center Stage: Where2GetIt Acquires Brandify appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

It’s been a busy few days for Twitter since announcing 15 New Types of Ads to users’ feeds. Word has traveled quickly during this period of uncertainty around Twitter’s sustainability as an advertising player. Now Twitter has continued the flow of news by announcing this morning it will acquire Cover, an Android-based lock-screen app. This extends the social media giant’s mobile ambitions.

Cover is a lock screen replacement that provides users with quick access to apps based on a contextual information and user history. For example, Cover will fill the lock screen with email, Instagram, Twitter and news apps because those are the applications that are checked first in the morning. The app utilizes data it learns for prior usage and behavior to predict which applications will be used in a given moment.

Cover has yet to specify what the acquisition means for the company but Twitter’s current crop of promoted advertising products haven’t resonated with mobile game and e-commerce companies. These entities’ advertising decisions are driven by app downloads and purchases Cover may be an answer to that problem. Twitter also has been testing a mobile-app install ad product as well. It is similar to the popular Facebook product which has been successful in pulling mobile advertising revenues.

In fact, this move parallels to what Facebook has done with Home, in carving out user engagement on the home and lock screen. That effort has been somewhat anemic so far for Facebook , but Twitter clearly sees some opportunity in a parallel effort.

Cover’s post-acquisition future could involve revenue through application discovery and promotion. Twitter could leverage the app by suggesting third party apps for the right occasion that users haven’t downloaded or purchased yet. Coupled with Twitter’s geo-targeting capabilities it could suggest apps based on nearby events or or other geographically relevant tie-ins.

Twitter has always possessed some aspects of “mobile-first” (140 characters is born from carrier-dictated SMS character limit). Through last week’s new ad products and today’s acquisition, it further cements itself as mobile player. Through this, we’ll see Twitter to ratchet up the share of ad it dollars — currently 75 percent — coming from mobile

The post Twitter’s Cover Acquisition: The Continued March Towards Mobile-First appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

It’s been a busy few days for Twitter since announcing 15 New Types of Ads to users’ feeds. Word has traveled quickly during this period of uncertainty around Twitter’s sustainability as an advertising player. Now Twitter has continued the flow of news by announcing this morning it will acquire Cover, an Android-based lock-screen app. This extends the social media giant’s mobile ambitions.

Cover is a lock screen replacement that provides users with quick access to apps based on a contextual information and user history. For example, Cover will fill the lock screen with email, Instagram, Twitter and news apps because those are the applications that are checked first in the morning. The app utilizes data it learns for prior usage and behavior to predict which applications will be used in a given moment.

Cover has yet to specify what the acquisition means for the company but Twitter’s current crop of promoted advertising products haven’t resonated with mobile game and e-commerce companies. These entities’ advertising decisions are driven by app downloads and purchases Cover may be an answer to that problem. Twitter also has been testing a mobile-app install ad product as well. It is similar to the popular Facebook product which has been successful in pulling mobile advertising revenues.

In fact, this move parallels to what Facebook has done with Home, in carving out user engagement on the home and lock screen. That effort has been somewhat anemic so far for Facebook , but Twitter clearly sees some opportunity in a parallel effort.

Cover’s post-acquisition future could involve revenue through application discovery and promotion. Twitter could leverage the app by suggesting third party apps for the right occasion that users haven’t downloaded or purchased yet. Coupled with Twitter’s geo-targeting capabilities it could suggest apps based on nearby events or or other geographically relevant tie-ins.

Twitter has always possessed some aspects of “mobile-first” (140 characters is born from carrier-dictated SMS character limit). Through last week’s new ad products and today’s acquisition, it further cements itself as mobile player. Through this, we’ll see Twitter to ratchet up the share of ad it dollars — currently 75 percent — coming from mobile

The post Twitter's Cover Acquisition: The Continued March Towards Mobile-First appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

It has been a quite the week for WhatsApp after being acquired for $19 billion by Facebook (FB) last Wednesday. Word about the deal has traveled fast. However, the big question that everyone is asking is “could the deal possibly be worth $19 billion?”

WhatsApp founder Jan Koum said at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that the company will introduce voice communication capabilities into the product starting in Q2 2014. This has the potential to dramatically enhance the value of the deal. News that WhatsApp will enter the voice communication market not only impacts the industry in a big way, it offers a completely new avenue of revenue generation for Facebook. This announcement comes at a time when the use of data is growing substantially while traditional voice plans are faltering.

On the other hand, if Facebook and WhatsApp fail to execute on the voice connectivity as a new source of revenue then the deal might be in some trouble. Facebook stated that it will not introduce advertising into the app, but let’s unpack that further. First, WhatsApp has huge reach but it doesn’t have a lot of data to be really meaningful for advertisers. In its current design, it doesn’t collect names, ages, genders or addresses. Nor does it store users’ messages. Not a great ad-targeting platform compared to Facebook’s current advertising operations. This leaves little advertising revenue potential if Facebook decided to go the advertising route.

WhatsApp boasts 450 million users (320 million of those being daily active users), and $20M in 2013 revenues. It is growing at 1M new users per day, with a user base that largely complements Facebook’s existing user base. Facebook likely prizes WhatsApp for its audience of teenagers and young adults who are increasingly using the service to engage in online conversations outside of Facebook proper.

WhatsApp also has a large international footprint. It started off growing in Europe, India and Latin America. WhatsApp has now grown to be a very important and valuable worldwide communication network. In fact, WhatsApp has a higher percent of people using it daily than Facebook itself.

This we know for sure, when the deal closes, Facebook will own four of the world’s most popular smartphone apps: Facebook itself, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. They are going to be on the smartphone’s home-screen in multiple ways. This news out of WhatsApp, coupled with any potential integration into the actual Facebook platform for voice connectivity, is significant. Is this a foreshadowing to a future with no need for voice or SMS plans?

The post The Facebook and WhatsApp Acquisition: A $19B deal and a Promising Future appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

There has been some heated discussions about teens and their decline in Facebook usage in 2013. Warnings that Facebook will earn its spot as the next “has been” social media website alongside Myspace are circulating the web. According to a study by Socialbakers, total reach of Facebook brand pages among teens ages 13-17 fluctuated throughout the year but ended 2013 in about the same realm it began. The teen’s age group was the only one in the study that did not have a substantial increase in reach in 2013 (29.1%).

So why did reach among teens remain stagnant in 2013? A very high level of market saturation among 12-17 year olds undoubtedly played into it. eMarketer estimates that “95.9% of social networkers ages 12-17 used Facebook in 2013.” With numbers that high, remaining stagnant is not so bad, however, future decrease is likely.

In Facebook’s Q3 2013 earnings call CFO, David Ebersman acknowledged that Facebook “did see a decrease in daily users specifically among younger teens.” Facebook’s rapid growth among older age groups is a big turn off to teens. Looking back at the Socailbakers study as noted by Marketing Charts, reach among ages 45-54 was up 69%, reach among ages 55-64 was up 71%, and reach among the study’s oldest age group (65 and up) was a whopping 74% higher at the end of 2013 than it was in the beginning. With most teens looking for independence, having their parents and grandparents on Facebook compromises its ability to give them that.

As a result, teens are not necessarily ending their relationships with Facebook, but are expanding the number of social media sites they use. According to a study by GlobalWebIndex, mobile chat services, video-sharing apps, and photo-sharing apps are becoming the new cool thing. Luckily, Facebook has its various acquisitions keeping it in the teen social media game. Facebook owns Instagram which has seen an 85% increase in teen usage in 2013. Most recently, Facebook announced that it would be acquiring the mobile messaging company WhatsApp for $19 billion. WhatsApp had an 81% increase in usage among teens in 2013.

To learn more about Facebook’s WhatsApp acquisition, check out BIA/Kelsey‘s post WhatsApp with $19B Acquisitions These Days? by Mike Boland.

The post Facebook and Teens: Their Future Together appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

In case you haven’t heard, Facebook just announced it will acquire mobile messaging company WhatsApp for $19 billion. And just like that, we have the largest venture backed acquisition in history (Sequioa alone pockets ~$3B), and the largest tech acquisition since HP/Compaq.

The news already has a few haters. Facebook stock is down about 5 percent at the time of this writing, due presumably to unease in a clear monetization plan, and some stock dilution from the equity portion of the deal. You can also expect to hear the word “bubble” many times this week.

There’s of course a lot to it, and I’ll leave the valuation angle to colleagues that wear that hat. From a tech and media perspective, it’s clear that messaging is now table stakes for companies building mobile products. Apple has iMessage, Google has Hangouts, and so on.

Facebook already has Messenger but it’s been pretty benign. So accelerating its moves into messaging can only happen through acquisition. There are also natural synergies between mobile messaging and a company that owns social connections, identity and a built-in network effect.

WhatsApp meanwhile was getting too big to ignore. Its messaging volume approaches the entire global telecom SMS market with 19 billion messages sent per day and 34 billion received (imbalance is due to group messaging). It also sends 900 million photos, voice & videos per day.

So it was a competitive threat if not bought, and a potential asset if bought (sound familiar?). Facebook has 550 million mobile active users, and WhatsApp already has 450 million. More importantly, those are mostly non-overlapping overseas users where Facebook’s growth plans lie.

As for the monetization question, there are a few ways to think about that. Mark Zuckerberg stated on the analyst call that they won’t monetize the app through ad support (it currently charges subscription in some countries). And they won’t integrate it with Facebook proper anytime soon.

But in the absence of ads or direct monetization, WhatsApp could be an effective loss leader to grow Facebook’s global user base. User acquisition is vital for a company like Facebook for which there’s a lock-in effect and a high lifetime customer value.

Monetization can then come in all of the other ways Facebook is building its revenue model. In that light WhatsApp can be seen as a play at sheer scale. And that needs to happen globally, where Facebook’s user base will underpin its network effect and all future plans as a business.

So was it worth $12B in cash and $7B in equity and earn outs? Probably not. But it’s not necessarily about how much WhatsApp is worth, but what’s it worth to Facebook? This comes back to Mark Zuckerberg’s apparent vision of buttressing Facebook’s growth with a messaging platform.

Tech valuations these days are less about traditional metrics like revenue multiples and ARPU. We’re seeing more weight put on another longstanding valuation metric: projected future cash flows. The challenge there is that it’s mired in intangibles for lots of tech companies.

In other words, Mark Zuckerberg’s projection is different than yours. And this discussion isn’t complete without SnapChat.  Zuckerberg is clearly intent on owning messaging — including ephemeral messaging — if you consider the anemic launch of Poke and a failed $3B Snapchat acquisition.

WhatsApp now puts Facebook in the position to do what it failed to do in these earlier attempts. It can integrate ephemeral messaging at a scale well beyond SnapChat’s reach.  This is clearly a vital part (at seemingly any cost) of Zuckerberg’s vision to maintain dominance of the social graph.

More soon from colleagues on the valuation side. In the meantime just for fun, here’s a list of things that are equal in value to WhatsApp’s price tag, as assembled by TechCrunch. I’ll add to their list, 19 billion packs of baseball cards and 62 million leprechauns.

$19 billion is…

— 4x the market cap of BlackBerry
— Approximately one-third the market cap of Ford
— 2.8x the market cap of GroupOn
— Effectively equal to the market cap of The Gap
— Slightly more than Sony’s market cap (around 10 percent)
— Around three-fourths the market cap of Delta
— 7.5 Mark Cubans
— Almost precisely one-third of HP’s market cap
— 2 nuclear submarines
— 62 percent of Twitter’s market cap
— 76,000 trips to space on Virgin Galactic
— Almost 60 percent of Sprint’s market cap
— 25 Instagram acquisitions

The post What's App with $19B Acquisitions These Days? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

In case you haven’t heard, Facebook just announced it will acquire mobile messaging company WhatsApp for $19 billion. And just like that, we have the largest venture backed acquisition in history (Sequioa alone pockets ~$3B), and the largest tech acquisition since HP/Compaq.

The news already has a few haters. Facebook stock is down about 5 percent at the time of this writing, due presumably to unease in a clear monetization plan, and some stock dilution from the equity portion of the deal. You can also expect to hear the word “bubble” many times this week.

There’s of course a lot to it, and I’ll leave the valuation angle to colleagues that wear that hat. From a tech and media perspective, it’s clear that messaging is now table stakes for companies building mobile products. Apple has iMessage, Google has Hangouts, and so on.

Facebook already has Messenger but it’s been pretty benign. So accelerating its moves into messaging can only happen through acquisition. There are also natural synergies between mobile messaging and a company that owns social connections, identity and a built-in network effect.

WhatsApp meanwhile was getting too big to ignore. Its messaging volume approaches the entire global telecom SMS market with 19 billion messages sent per day and 34 billion received (imbalance is due to group messaging). It also sends 900 million photos, voice & videos per day.

So it was a competitive threat if not bought, and a potential asset if bought (sound familiar?). Facebook has 550 million mobile active users, and WhatsApp already has 450 million. More importantly, those are mostly non-overlapping overseas users where Facebook’s growth plans lie.

As for the monetization question, there are a few ways to think about that. Mark Zuckerberg stated on the analyst call that they won’t monetize the app through ad support (it currently charges subscription in some countries). And they won’t integrate it with Facebook proper anytime soon.

But in the absence of ads or direct monetization, WhatsApp could be an effective loss leader to grow Facebook’s global user base. User acquisition is vital for a company like Facebook for which there’s a lock-in effect and a high lifetime customer value.

Monetization can then come in all of the other ways Facebook is building its revenue model. In that light WhatsApp can be seen as a play at sheer scale. And that needs to happen globally, where Facebook’s user base will underpin its network effect and all future plans as a business.

So was it worth $12B in cash and $7B in equity and earn outs? Probably not. But it’s not necessarily about how much WhatsApp is worth, but what’s it worth to Facebook? This comes back to Mark Zuckerberg’s apparent vision of buttressing Facebook’s growth with a messaging platform.

Tech valuations these days are less about traditional metrics like revenue multiples and ARPU. We’re seeing more weight put on another longstanding valuation metric: projected future cash flows. The challenge there is that it’s mired in intangibles for lots of tech companies.

In other words, Mark Zuckerberg’s projection is different than yours. And this discussion isn’t complete without SnapChat.  Zuckerberg is clearly intent on owning messaging — including ephemeral messaging — if you consider the anemic launch of Poke and a failed $3B Snapchat acquisition.

WhatsApp now puts Facebook in the position to do what it failed to do in these earlier attempts. It can integrate ephemeral messaging at a scale well beyond SnapChat’s reach.  This is clearly a vital part (at seemingly any cost) of Zuckerberg’s vision to maintain dominance of the social graph.

More soon from colleagues on the valuation side. In the meantime just for fun, here’s a list of things that are equal in value to WhatsApp’s price tag, as assembled by TechCrunch. I’ll add to their list, 19 billion packs of baseball cards and 62 million leprechauns.

$19 billion is…

— 4x the market cap of BlackBerry
— Approximately one-third the market cap of Ford
— 2.8x the market cap of GroupOn
— Effectively equal to the market cap of The Gap
— Slightly more than Sony’s market cap (around 10 percent)
— Around three-fourths the market cap of Delta
— 7.5 Mark Cubans
— Almost precisely one-third of HP’s market cap
— 2 nuclear submarines
— 62 percent of Twitter’s market cap
— 76,000 trips to space on Virgin Galactic
— Almost 60 percent of Sprint’s market cap
— 25 Instagram acquisitions

The post What’s App with $19B Acquisitions These Days? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

While the volume of deals (acquisitions and capital raises) in the local media space hasn’t really grown much this year, the volume of these deals exploded, according to BIA/Kelsey’s deal tracking effort called Local Media Investment Watch. Deal value across the local categories LMIW tracks grew by 65 percent to $10.2 billion year to date.

Today at BIA/Kelsey’s Leading in Local: Interactive Local Media conference, BIA/Kelsey analysts Jeanne Datillo and Jed Williams, architects of Local Media Investment Watch, shared some compelling data points that draw a picture of where the local media energy and investment interest lie.

Online was one of the fastest growing categories in terms of deal value (deal volume actually declined), expanding 150 percent so far this year. What drove this? According to Williams, the activity centered around digital services that drive engagement, upsell and retention — think CRM, online scheduling and merchant services. Examples include Open Table’s acquisition of Urbanspoon’s Rezbook reservation management system, and Hotel Tonight‘s ability to raise a $45 million funding round.

“This will accelerate over the next year,” Williams said. “As more investment, more agencies pushing into this space.”

Datillo also noted the home services space (which includes real estate) continues to attract deals. Examples? Trulia bought market leader, a tech platform for the real estate industry, for $335 million. “There is continued green space in the home services sector,” Datillo said. Other verticals are getting investment as well, noting recent deals involving Zoc Doc (medical records) and Wedding Wire.

“If you can innovate and be creative around niche verticals, you will get money,” Williams said.

What about social? Williams asked, “Consumer facing asocial networks, when does the door close?”

“If a social platform is creating a niche for a target audience, there is a good chance to get some investment.” Examples? NextDoor (raised $60 million), Path (raised $50 million), and Snapchat, which reportedly turned down $3 billion from Facebook.

The post At Leading in Local: ILM 2013: Where’s the Money? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.