The name of the game this week is gearing up for our big SMB Digital Marketing conference in New Orleans. I’ve been spending lots of time talking to speakers about what we’ll discuss on stage — which has mostly focused on the day 2 session: Brass Tacks: Where is Mobile Actually Working for SMBs.

As the title indicates, this will cut through the hype in SMB mobile marketing to see what’s really working. One little known fact is that most location based mobile marketing today is national advertisers. As an ad medium, it hasn’t really moved down market to SMBs in a scalable way (yet).

That has a lot to do with the traditional challenges of the SMB segment in its slower adaptiveness, and sales challenges. So there are a just a handful of players that are selling and fulfilling mobile tools to SMBs in a meaningful way. We’re happy to say that we have those players on our mobile session.

Those include Yelp, YP, Verve Mobile, and Paypal. Each have done lots of impactful things over the past year. We’ll mostly discuss their approach, what’s working, what’s not working, and how does that shed light on where winning strategies may lie for the coming phases of SMB mobile marketing?

So we’ll be talking to them on stage, one by one. Hope to see you there.

The post SMB Digital Marketing Preview: Where is Mobile Actually Working for SMBs? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Fifty plus industry leaders will grace the stage at Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing Sept. 22-24 in New Orleans. We’re looking forward to a great show. Want to do some research before the event? Here’s some recent BIA/Kelsey blog coverage of the featured speakers (Click on the hyperlinks).

Acxiom: Scott Howe, CEO (Keynote, Day 2)

Alignable: Eric Groves, CEO (Future Stars, Day 2)

Booker: Josh McCarter, CEO (Scheduling ,Day 2)

Facebook: Joe DeVoy, Product Manager, Local Ads, Facebook (Social Media Shift, Day 2)

First Data/Perka: Mike Lazarro, Head of Planning (Beyond Advertising, Day 3)

ForwardLine: Craig Coleman, CEO (Cultivating SMB Success, Day 2)

Groupon: Dan Roarty, VP, Product Development (Keynote, Day 2)

Local Media Association: Nancy Lane, President (Local Media Heavy Hitters, Day 3)

Radius: Megan Austin Karlen, VP (Smart Data, Day 2)

ReachLocal: Sharon Rowlands,CEO, (Keynote, Day 2)

SignPost: Stu Wall, CEO (Beyond Advertising, Day 3)

Verve: Tom Kenney, President (Brass Tacks Mobile, Day 2)

Wanderful Media: Doug Kilponen, COO (SMB Retail, Day 2)

Yelp: Darnell Holloway, Sr. Mgr., Community Outreach (SMBs On Stage with Yelp, Day 1); Peter Curzon, Business Development ( Brass Tracks Mobile, Day 2)

YP: Jeff Federman, SVP, Digital (Brass Tacks Mobile, Day 2)

The post Useful Research for New Orleans: Recent Blog Coverage, SMB Digital Marketing Speakers appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Last month we released a white paper in tandem with Verve Mobile on the emerging art of mobile and cross platform ad attribution. It’s the holy grail of advertising in being able to track campaign effectiveness post ad engagement (cue John Wanamaker quote).

One thing I’ve been thinking of a lot is how all of the innovations in location based ad targeting and attribution will collide with the parallel advancements in indoor mapping and engagement (a la iBeacon). Getting mobile users to stores is one thing… what about after they get there.

Verve and others have already begun to answer that questions by correlating ad effectiveness to sales lifts and other metrics like location tracking and purchase data. To add another dimension, the company announced yesterday it will plug in to Apple’s iBeacon and Passbook standards.

From the press release:

Apple, Inc.’s Passbook is a pre-installed application on iPhones that allows users to save marketing messages, coupons, store cards, and other items in a “virtual wallet.” Apple’s iBeacon technology works with Bluetooth Low Energy devices (‘Beacons’) that enable iOS devices to react with a marketing message in close proximity.

For example, on behalf of a major national CPG manufacturer and in coordination with its retail partners, Verve is targeting specific users who, based on their location and context, are optimal recipients for the CPG brand message and the specific offer in a ‘drive to retail’ campaign. Consumers engaging with the ad have the option of saving the offer to Passbook. At retail, the offer is re-activated via Verve-supplied iBeacons. The solution then provides engagement, location and other analytics back to the Verve ad server.

This will clarify ad effectiveness in seeing what campaigns led to in-store sales. And the purchase data gathered can in turn plug back into the targeting engine for iterative campaign optimization. Indeed, Verve’s new integration plugs into it’s “Foot Traffic Index”.

Additionally for marketers, this solution enhances the already significant utility of Verve’s proprietary “Foot Traffic Index” a method of measuring the amount of lift in foot traffic attributable to a specific campaign. In combining Bluetooth LE beacon technology with device location observations, Verve is extending FTI’s usefulness to scenarios where location data are unavailable or imprecise, for example, indoor shopping malls or multi-story retail environments.

Verve’s unique combination of device location and beacon proximity intelligence makes FTI a much more effective tool for gauging a campaign’s performance in more challenging and densely populated retail locations. Marketers working with Verve on this new solution may either deploy low-cost beacons supplied by Verve specifically for the campaign or leverage existing beacon programs.

The Passbook tie in is interesting too. As we’ve written, Passbook has lots of potential in its standardization of coupon and ticketing formats. Planting it at the OS level fights the fragmentation that currently holds back user acclimation and developer adoption.

But it hasn’t taken off as fast as I expected: its value will be a function of network effect and how many developers build on it. I still believe that is coming and integrations like Verve’s will shine a light on its value and start that ball rolling.

Meanwhile iBeacon will sink or swim based on the same developer adoption (see shopkick’s play). But there’s great deal of momentum behind indoor location/engagement, and it’s the next logical step in the progression of mobile advertising.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTUnFXh3Enw

The post Verve Takes Mobile Ad and Attribution Strategy Indoors appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

One of the hottest topics in tech & media is the quickly evolving state of mobile advertising. Meanwhile, some of mobile’s early promises include high intent users, and more trackable advertising.

The latter is where things are really getting interesting. And we’re seeing the collision of big data and mobile yield lots of interesting ways to measure ad campaign effectiveness. That’s where the art of attribution comes in.

We unpacked the state of the industry in a recent report that was pushed out for distribution today. This is part of our series of co-produced reports, done in tandem with Verve Mobile. It highlights attribution drivers and best practices.

Check out the exec summary below, and you can download the entire thing here. And unlike much of our long form content, it’s free. We’ll discuss this topic a great deal in 2014, especially at our conferences. Stay tuned.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Mobile tops the list of tech and media topics that have gained the marketplace’s attention and investment over the past few years. This focus is being sustained by hardware innovation, rising smartphone penetration and the resulting mobile Web and app usage.

A key part of this discussion is monetization. Though paid apps have succeeded in some areas such as games or niche vertical interest, ad support is a more broadly fitting choice for lots of app developers and publishers, due to mobile users’ high commercial intent.

But a challenge has arisen in the slower than expected advertiser adoption. Put another way, advertiser adoption hasn’t caught up with mobile usage. Mobile holds a 12 percent share of U.S. consumers’ media time, but only a 3 percent share of ad revenue.

The good news is that a few factors will counter this supply/demand imbalance that’s mitigating sell-side monetization. For one, mobile’s high engagement relative to other ad supported media will create premium inventory that boosts advertiser demand and rates.

One of the main sources of this premium lift will be location targeted ads. Their value will be a function of congruence with user intent, such as 50 percent of Google mobile searches that seek local information. Location targeted ad performance will also drive this.

Such performance deltas for mobile ads that carry various flavors of location relevance are already evident from data shared by mobile ad companies cited in this report. Advertiser demand will follow in an inevitable process of market evolution towards higher ROI.

Mobile local campaign tactics won’t just involve where the ads show up and what they contain, but how they’re measured. A feedback loop of ad effectiveness drives towards one of the most important areas of mobile ad innovation in the coming years: Attribution.

Knowing which ads effectively drove brand lift and various forms of conversions will have a vital role in optimizing and assigning value to mobile ad tactics. And that will only come about through accurate measurement of actions taken after ad exposure and engagement.

This is developing in lots of ways that are getting attention such as “closed loop” point of sale technologies. This includes mobile payments, coupons and other areas whose nascent stage and fragmented standards compel more realistic near-term solutions.

Attribution technologies are developing along these lines to speak the language of large advertisers. Brand ad dollars are where the action is in mobile today, and attributing the success of those campaigns is the name of the game.

The question remains how? The science of mobile ad attribution is at an early stage, but we’re already seeing innovation and emerging best practices.

This report examines ways mobile advertising and attribution are materializing, how mobile location data is playing a central role in these approaches and where they’re moving next.

The post Free BIA/Kelsey Report: Mobile Ad Attribution appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

One of the hottest topics in tech & media is the quickly evolving state of mobile advertising. Meanwhile, some of mobile’s early promises include high intent users, and more trackable advertising.

The latter is where things are really getting interesting. And we’re seeing the collision of big data and mobile yield lots of interesting ways to measure ad campaign effectiveness. That’s where the art of attribution comes in.

We unpacked the state of the industry in a report that publishes today. This is part of our series of co-produced reports, done in tandem with Verve Mobile. It highlights attribution drivers and best practices.

Check out the exec summary below, and you can download the entire thing here. We’ll discuss this topic a great deal in the coming months, especially at our Interactive Local Media conference next week. Stay tuned.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Mobile tops the list of tech and media topics that have gained the marketplace’s attention and investment over the past few years. This focus is being sustained by hardware innovation, rising smartphone penetration and the resulting mobile Web and app usage.

A key part of this discussion is monetization. Though paid apps have succeeded in some areas such as games or niche vertical interest, ad support is a more broadly fitting choice for lots of app developers and publishers, due to mobile users’ high commercial intent.

But a challenge has arisen in the slower than expected advertiser adoption. Put another way, advertiser adoption hasn’t caught up with mobile usage. Mobile holds a 12 percent share of U.S. consumers’ media time, but only a 3 percent share of ad revenue.

The good news is that a few factors will counter this supply/demand imbalance that’s mitigating sell-side monetization. For one, mobile’s high engagement relative to other ad supported media will create premium inventory that boosts advertiser demand and rates.

One of the main sources of this premium lift will be location targeted ads. Their value will be a function of congruence with user intent, such as 50 percent of Google mobile searches that seek local information. Location targeted ad performance will also drive this.

Such performance deltas for mobile ads that carry various flavors of location relevance are already evident from data shared by mobile ad companies cited in this report. Advertiser demand will follow in an inevitable process of market evolution towards higher ROI.

Mobile local campaign tactics won’t just involve where the ads show up and what they contain, but how they’re measured. A feedback loop of ad effectiveness drives towards one of the most important areas of mobile ad innovation in the coming years: Attribution.

Knowing which ads effectively drove brand lift and various forms of conversions will have a vital role in optimizing and assigning value to mobile ad tactics. And that will only come about through accurate measurement of actions taken after ad exposure and engagement.

This is developing in lots of ways that are getting attention such as “closed loop” point of sale technologies. This includes mobile payments, coupons and other areas whose nascent stage and fragmented standards compel more realistic near-term solutions.

Attribution technologies are developing along these lines to speak the language of large advertisers. Brand ad dollars are where the action is in mobile today, and attributing the success of those campaigns is the name of the game.

The question remains how? The science of mobile ad attribution is at an early stage, but we’re already seeing innovation and emerging best practices.

This report examines ways mobile advertising and attribution are materializing, how mobile location data is playing a central role in these approaches and where they’re moving next.

The post New BIA/Kelsey Report: Mobile Ad Attribution appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.