Over the past few weeks, we’ve been writing and recording analyst roundtables about a potential new area of local media and advertising: Variable product pricing.

Like airline pricing, but on steroids, the idea is that the age of big data and mobile signals will better reveal consumer demand and probability to transact (think: proximity, past behavior, etc.).

From there, the next step is to work towards more economically attractive yield management and revenue optimization for local businesses. It could really unlock value in high value verticals like autos.

The topic is further explored in my monthly Street Fight column. Check out the excerpt below and the rest is here. We’ll also tackle this at our Leading in Local conference, just two weeks away.

(email me at mbolandATbiakelsey.com if you want a discount code to register)

A few weeks ago while between meetings at AdTech NY, I stepped into a session just in time for Retailigence CEO Jeremy Geiger to trigger an a-ha moment about local product pricing. Then the next day at Qualcomm’s LTE Direct Summit, it surfaced again.

The idea stems from the shifting attitude in local to use proximity-based data beyond just ad targeting, toward better ad creative. This takes in variables like weather, time of day, and product availability. What’s nearby, on the shelf, right now? And what does it cost?

Retailigence has done this for years with an API for app developers and ad networks to bake in SKU-level product data. But developing more recently is combining this with increasingly robust mobile signals and sometimes obscure data that capture situational relevance.

Geiger provided the example of measuring something as esoteric as the airborne pollen count. In concert with inventory data of nearby pharmacies, you can imagine how ads can be targeted and crafted in ways to reach allergy sufferers in time-sensitive ways.

This isn’t totally new, but it gets interesting when the data are used to not only to create relevant ads, but also better yield management. In other words, variable pricing to generate or capture demand in more economically strategic ways. Think airfare pricing.

It boils down to segmenting consumers by willingness to pay for something — a function of location-oriented factors. It’s a jacked up version of the airline model in that it that maximizes revenue with demand-driven pricing. But is there a local commerce version?

We’re getting closer: all these proximity-related factors enable predictive modeling around transaction probability. That can then be plugged into an equation to determine price sensitivity or elasticity on an individual level. What discount will get your attention?

Read the rest.

The post Variable Pricing for Local Commerce, Take 2 appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

At Leading in Local: Interactive Local Media Dec. 10-12 in San Francisco, we are presenting 50 of local’s top players. Want some homework? We’ve pulled recent coverage of some of our speakers from our Local Media Watch blog. There’s plenty of great reading here, and you’ll experience — first hand — how fast things have been changing.

Patrick Barry, GM, Intuit/DemandForce
Intuit Acquires Online Scheduler

Matthew Berk, CEO, Lucky Oyster
Matthew Berk Rethinks WOM via Lucky Oyster

Brian Boland, VP, Facebook
Facebook/Google Vertical Wars: Facebook Grabs a Google Auto Exec

Suzanne Cooper, Managing Editor, SF Chronicle
SF Chronicle’s Cooper: The Fight to Save Journalism

Jeremy Geiger, CEO, Retailigence
Closed Loop Mobile Local Shopping: A Conversation with Retailigence

Dan Hight, SVP, xAd
XAd and Posterscope: Retargeting For The Real World

Ziad Ismail, SVP, Marchex
Marchex Maps Call Monetization Genome

Mark Roberge, SVP, Hubspot
BIA-Kelsey Briefing: Hubspot Points to a New Way of Selling

Chris Schroeder, Author , Startup Rising
Bookshelf: Christopher Schroeder’s Startup Rising

Sean Smyth, VP, Groupon
A Look at Groupon’s New Partner Network

Eckart Walther, CEO, CardSpring
Merchants Drive Their Own Transaction Marketing via Cardspring Connect

The post Reading List: Recent Blog Coverage of LIL: ILM Speakers appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

This of course comes in handy as mobile shopping and search continue to ramp up. User buying intent for real world purchases tends to be higher in mobile, so providing more information to capture that intent is the name of the game.

This of includes calls to action like phone numbers and mapping which are key areas we continue to examine. Retailigence takes it another step with product information — not just what retailers carry but what sizes and colors are on the shelf now.

This is particularly fitting in product areas where there is a high degree of variability and specificity. Think clothing in different colors/sizes or consumer electronics with spec variations. In the interview below, CEO Jeremy Geiger and I unpack all of this.

And if it’s any indication of the speed of this market — and of Retailigence’s own pace of innovation — its usage has grown from even what was discussed in the interview. For example the company just recently baked in new functionality for product reserve/pickup.

The video is below and our past Retailigence blog coverage is here. You can also check out our recent white paper on mobile shopping and payments which relates. Lastly, we’ll cover all of this at our ILM conference in December in San Francisco. Hope to see you there.

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Building ecommerce, promotions, search, social and same day delivery services around store inventory is one of those high concept “local” concepts that always make so much sense but have been tough to build around.

Intuit and eBay have both purchased inventory services (StepUp and Milo) and have integrated their capabilities into their other local services. eBay, for instance, has built the suite of services in eBay Local around Milo. Other key players in the space include JiWire (via its acquisition of NearbyNow), Wishpond and Retailigence. All focus on larger retailers with multiple locations, rather than mom and pops.

Retailigence, a three year old, Silicon Valley-based company backed by $4.3 Million from DFJ, Quest Venture Partners, and Dave McClure, stands out by taking an enterprise-oriented, B2B approach.

“We are 100 percent B2B. We don’t have a consumer-facing website or app, but thousands of applications rely on Retailigence in the backend,” says CEO and founder Jeremy Geiger, who comes from a supply chain management background. A major partner, for instance, is SAP, which provides management software to mid-and-large sized retailers.

The company uses point of sales (POS) integrations to gain access to real time inventory and product data, and currently works with 100,000 stores from 325 retailers. It is “a totally different use” of POS than what loyalty services such as FiveStars and Belly are doing, which is attaching sales information to individual buyers, says Geiger. “It is the inventory modules. The data is very specific. It has product, inventory and price and some description of the product.”

It is also different than the ecommerce approach taken by Google and others, which wait for sales to check inventory. “While they experiment with the use of local data in different ways, at best they are getting daily feeds from retailers. It doesn’t enable true online to offline commerce,” argues Geiger.

Geiger says that one of the fastest growing uses of Retailigence’s inventory data is to coordinate between brands and stores. Consumers have been trained to type in store names, but when they are out and about, they really want to type in what they are looking for (i.e. “iPhone charger”). “It is a more efficient and effective way to search for goods that will spur more sales,” he says – especially to smaller retailers that are often left out of the equation.

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