SMBs in the entertainment vertical love video advertising. We’re talking movie theaters, event venues, catering, on-demand performers*, etc.. As is conducive to their craft, they’re big fans of online video, particularly website and YouTube videos. They’re also big on cable and broadcast TV.

This is according to BIA/Kelsey’s latest cut of SMB survey data (information below). On average, these Entertainment SMBs spend 12 percent of ad budget on video, much more than overall SMBs. When applied to their high ad spending, this notably produces an average annual video spend of $4,000.

This class of SMBs are also heavy users of social media of all types, and have a high interest level in advertising and marketing services. This is the wrap: Entertainment SMBs are good prospects for video and social media products. They use a lot, spend a lot, and they have their antennas out.

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These were a few of the top-level findings of the latest cut of LCM 18, focusing on SMBs in the Entertainment vertical. Clients of BIA/Kelsey can access this report through our client portal. The report is also available for purchase, and more information on the LCM survey is here.

*SMBs in Entertainment is a roll-up category that includes: Restaurants, Bars, Hospitality (Catering/Hotel), Music, and Entertainment – miscellaneous.

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Yelp is acquiring Eat24, the online delivery and pickup service that competes with GrubHub, Delivery.com and other national and regional players for order-taking, food search and discovery. The service is being acquired for the equivalent of $134 million ($75 million in cash and 1.4 million Class A shares).

Eat24 currently provides menus, order-taking and tracking services for more than 20,000 restaurants in 1,500 cities — 10,000 fewer than GrubHub. Like GrubHub, its revenue model is based on commissions (industry standards are typically 10-12 percent per order.) The service is free to the consumer, although restaurants can charge their own delivery fees.

The service is largely dependent on customer pick up at restaurant locations, but delivery is becoming a larger factor. In several California cities, for instance, Eat24 will soon be providing delivery via SideCar, the shared-car service.

Founded in 2008, Eat24 has been integrated with Yelp’s mobile app since 2013. By bringing Eat24 in-house, Yelp can strengthen its platform of services, which have grown beyond advertising and now includes scheduling, reservations/booking and offers. Yelp reports that it has over 93,000 active local accounts.

While Eat24 currently lags behind GrubHub, online delivery is still a nascent category. Moreover, it is ripe for cross-over activity with other food-related segments, including rating/reviews (i.e Yelp and Zomato, which just acquired IAC’s UrbanSpoon); online reservations (i.e. Priceline’s OpenTable); and eventually even grocery delivery (i.e. Amazon, WalMart and Google.)

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Priceline is sort of like eBay — a company known for its origins in auctions, but more recently focusing on distinct, “buy it now” niches. It has recently fleshed out its core travel brand by moving up the value chain to travel reservations via its acquisition of Kayak. It has also gotten into the “sharing economy” by adding AirBnB-like private listings to its Booking.com brand, which is an international powerhouse.

Today, Priceline added restaurant reservations and search to its stable via the $2.6 Billion purchase of industry leader OpenTable, which works with 31,000 restaurants — mostly high end white table cloth restaurants willing to pay a hefty premium for reservations management and leads to undecided consumers. Open Table is an international leader with strong customer bases in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Japan and Mexico.

For Priceline, the most attractive parts of the deal are probably OpenTable’s 15 million, high end, travel-oriented customers; the company’s verified, high quality restaurant reviews; OpenTable’s strong mobile orientation; and its extensive affiliate network with 600+ local and vertical sites, which receive commissions for sending traffic to OpenTable (and accounting for 5-10 percent of OpenTable’s business.) These networks might be extended to include other Priceline properties.

There is probably some disconnect with OpenTable’s high-end customer base and Priceline’s discount set — most OpenTable customers won’t be using Priceline itself. And an effort to extend OpenTable’s feature set with Groupon-like deals proved to be underwhelming (although the company has maintained an extensive and apparently successful “Dining Checques” loyalty program). Many OpenTable customers are also not using the service in travel mode — they are local.

Still, OpenTable customers might use the other services. And the seamless Priceline app experience could also be applied as mobile becomes a paramount factor for all travel services.

A larger question we’d have is the core of OpenTable’s value proposition for restaurants: the reservations management system, which is based on dedicated customer premise equipment (known as The Electronic Reservations Book.) The average ERB using restaurant pays $249 for the service (plus $1.00 per seated diner using the OpenTable system.) But in the age of tablet-based POS and reservations services using WiFI, OpenTable’s proprietary system would seem threatened.

So far, it has held its own against such tablet-oriented companies as UrbanSpoon‘s Rez and Groupon‘s Breadcrumb — OpenTable’s base of customers is too strong to quickly turn off. OpenTable itself is preparing for a transition. Yet, it has been developing a Cloud Based program that charge a $2.49 per diner charge.

Structurally, we also ask ourselves whether OpenTable is in a distinct “high end restaurant reservations silo,” where it now sits; or whether it is really part of a developing “food silo” that is based on search and discovery, would also include reviews; restaurant and fastfood delivery (i.e. GrubHub), grocery delivery (Amazon Fresh, Google) and reviews (Yelp.) Priceline might be positioning itself to be in the right of the middle of these conjoining elements. (then again… the new silo might ultimately be oriented more around delivery).

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photo courtesy of Crain’s Chicago Business

All eyes are on “local” this morning on Wall Street, with GrubHub‘s IPO off to a great start. The company has placed 7.4 million shares priced at $26, or $192.4 million. The shares closed at $34.

We’ve been watching GrubHub’s IPO with real interest. The Chicago-based online take out ordering company — which merged last August with Seamless, its primary competitor — represents a key local “food” anchor, along with Open Table, UrbanSpoon, Groupon (reservations); Yelp and Google+ (reviews); and eventually, Amazon, WalMart, Google,eBay, TBD (grocery delivery).

It has 28.8K restaurants and 135,000 daily orders. Forty-three percent of its activity now takes place from mobile devices, a key metric in this space which relies on impulse purchasing. The company has operations in most major U.S. cities, but is strongly penetrated in several.

In this area, which might loosely be termed as “food,” the silos are falling fast — they each do a little of each. We expect to see a major land grab by the key players that are already in the space, and the possible addition of other tech and retail players.

At its most basic level, GrubHub views, confirms and tracks food orders, It makes its money from commissions of roughly 10-12 percent. Last year, it made $137 million. But the company’s value extends beyond order taking. It acts as a giant search and discovery engine that can bring customers back to locations, and recommend others when they are in the mood for something else.

The cost to use GrubHub is relatively high. There have been anecdotes in the press about some restaurants quitting GrubHub, seeing a drop in orders, but making higher profits. Obviously, these reports are not the general consensus, as the company continues to grow.

But the best way for restaurants to justify its cost is if they chalk it off as a promotional expense. GrubHub executives like to point out that it is ultimately cheaper and more retentive to spend on GrubHub than on a deals site such as Groupon, with its high commission structure taking 30-50 percent, on top of high discounting off menu prices.

While GrubHub has a nice lead in this space for now, the key for it now will be to extend its brand and reach. Its brand awareness remains low, and it is mostly known among niches such as office workers and college students. The company’s current competitors include Delivery.com, which claims a roster of almost 10,000 restaurants in 50 cities; and Eat24.com, which covers 20,000 restaurants in 1,000 cities across the country.

We’ll be watching for activity from companies such as Yelp, Google and other players too, either via start up or acquisition.

The post GrubHub IPOs: Thoughts About GrubHub and the ‘Food’ Segment appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

photo courtesy of Crain’s Chicago Business

All eyes are on “local” this morning on Wall Street, with GrubHub‘s IPO off to a great start. The company has placed 7.4 million shares priced at $26, or $192.4 million. The shares closed at $34.

We’ve been watching GrubHub’s IPO with real interest. The Chicago-based online take out ordering company — which merged last August with Seamless, its primary competitor — represents a key local “food” anchor, along with Open Table, UrbanSpoon, Groupon (reservations); Yelp and Google+ (reviews); and eventually, Amazon, WalMart, Google,eBay, TBD (grocery delivery).

It has 28.8K restaurants and 135,000 daily orders. Forty-three percent of its activity now takes place from mobile devices, a key metric in this space which relies on impulse purchasing. The company has operations in most major U.S. cities, but is strongly penetrated in several.

In this area, which might loosely be termed as “food,” the silos are falling fast — they each do a little of each. We expect to see a major land grab by the key players that are already in the space, and the possible addition of other tech and retail players.

At its most basic level, GrubHub views, confirms and tracks food orders, It makes its money from commissions of roughly 10-12 percent. Last year, it made $137 million. But the company’s value extends beyond order taking. It acts as a giant search and discovery engine that can bring customers back to locations, and recommend others when they are in the mood for something else.

The cost to use GrubHub is relatively high. There have been anecdotes in the press about some restaurants quitting GrubHub, seeing a drop in orders, but making higher profits. Obviously, these reports are not the general consensus, as the company continues to grow.

But the best way for restaurants to justify its cost is if they chalk it off as a promotional expense. GrubHub executives like to point out that it is ultimately cheaper and more retentive to spend on GrubHub than on a deals site such as Groupon, with its high commission structure taking 30-50 percent, on top of high discounting off menu prices.

While GrubHub has a nice lead in this space for now, the key for it now will be to extend its brand and reach. Its brand awareness remains low, and it is mostly known among niches such as office workers and college students. The company’s current competitors include Delivery.com, which claims a roster of almost 10,000 restaurants in 50 cities; and Eat24.com, which covers 20,000 restaurants in 1,000 cities across the country.

We’ll be watching for activity from companies such as Yelp, Google and other players too, either via start up or acquisition.

The post GrubHub IPOs: Thoughts About GrubHub and the 'Food' Segment appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Unlike other media, radio advertising is quite diverse, generating 10% or more of its advertising from five different verticals. Retail (18%), Financial/Insurance (17%), Restaurants (14.5%), Automotive (14%), and Technology (10%) accounted for almost 3/4 of advertising on radio in 2012.

Diving into the top vertical, Retail, warehouse clubs and supercenters accounted for the largest share of retail advertising, 22.7%, just as it was in other media I’ve discussed, such as newspaper and direct mail.

Three out of eleven subcategories accounted for a combined 67% of the advertising spend in the financial/insurance category: commercial banking, securities brokerage and auto insurance.

Media Ad View Plus breaks the restaurant category into seven subcategories. Three of these subcategories accounted for 83.5% of advertising revenue in this category for radio: full-service restaurants, supermarkets and other grocery stores (not including convenience stores) and quick-service/fast food restaurants.

For automotive, auto dealers and manufacturers accounted for nearly 77% of the category’s advertising spending, much as it did for television and newspaper.

In the Technology category, the wired telecommunications carriers and wireless telecommunications carriers (except satellite) accounted for a combined 72% of the advertising spend in the category.

BIA/Kelsey projects radio advertising revenue to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.85% from 2012 through 2017. In 2017, radio advertising is projected to reach nearly $16.9 billion, representing 11.4% of total advertising spend for the year. Retail, financial/insurance, restaurants, automotive and technology are expected to remain the top categories for radio advertising spending in 2017.

More information on Media Ad View Plus is available here.

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Canada’s Yellow Pages Group has deepened its investment in verticals with its recent acquisition of Restaurantica, one of Canada’s largest online dining communities. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but a report by Paul Steep at Scotia Capital suggests the amount was immaterial to YPG’s financial results.

Restaurantica was founded in 2003, and has more than 400,000 restaurant listings (50,000 in Canada) and 200,000 reviews in North America. YPG’s objective is to deepen content and user engagement in one of its most critical online search categories. The deal is interesting in part because YPG CEO Marc Tellier has in the past made statements expressing doubts about the compatibility of consumer reviews and Yellow Pages.

According to Nicolas Gaudreau, YPG’s vice president, digital media: “Approximately 80 percent of dining decisions are significantly influenced by recommendations and reviews. This acquisition allows us to reinforce our commitment to helping consumers make smarter business decisions.”

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