• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, July 29, 2010

Media Daily News: You made a big move from analyst to marketing practitioner. When you were at Forrester, what was the No.1 untapped opportunity for your marketing clients, that you hope to impact as a practitioner now that you're on the agency side?

Lisa Bradner: Marketers are challenged by so many shifting priorities and most of them continue to take a "top down" approach to marketing. They put the big idea out there via national media and then nibble at the fringes of engagement with social, mobile and other digital initiatives. I'd like to help them use data and analytics to think differently about marketing: start with your best markets and most engaged customers and create relevant product experiences for them and then use technology to replicate that model nationally.

MDN: There seems to be a lot of buzz surrounding hyper-local, including some promising new platforms such as Canoe Venture's, Navic and FourSquare. What's the real deal? How far along are we here?

Bradner: We're at the beginning of understanding how technology can match the right message to the right customer at the right time, and location is a core component of that. Geo opt-in is getting all the attention right now (you checked in so I know where you are) but we shouldn't discount the importance of broad place-based market intelligence as a complement.

MDN: What role will Geomentum play in helping to accelerate the hyper-local marketplace?

Bradner: For many years hyper-local remained in the "too hard" pile. We're bringing scale and technology that will bring together the intimacy of a local experience with the scale to drive marketers' business.

MDN: Hyper-local is creating a new white space between local (DMA-level) and CRM (household-level). Why would a marketer want to get into this arena?

Bradner:: At Geomentum we focus on "one-to-some." By targeting to the neighborhood you can get enormous relevance and customization without the expense and risk of juggling a lot of personal data. We help national marketers create a local feel so they can emphasize the products and services that are best for the neighborhood they're trying to reach.

MDN: Hyper-local seems to be getting tested across a variety of platforms. When and how will this really scale?

Bradner: Three misperceptions are holding back hyper-local today: That it's expensive, it's hard to scale and it's hard to measure. In fact, hyper-local can scale cost effectively if you allow technology to support decision-making. We're hand-in-glove with the vendor-side hyper-local providers to make this smoother and easier for marketers to dive in. Also, hyper-local is not just a shiny-thing. It can be measured, --not just in impressions. Our decision support system lets clients see all media and how it drives store-level success for every single store. We're talking about dollars and cents by store, by neighborhood. That's ROI if I've ever seen it.

MDN: What categories or businesses will benefit most from a hyper-local approach?

Bradner: Any advertiser in more than two neighborhoods will see returns from a hyper-local approach. We're in a time where the nation has tremendous variance within a single DMA, or local market. We have the ability to leverage insights about these micro economies to inform the way we market, message and measure success in those neighborhoods. This rolls up to an incredibly strategic way to activate precision marketing that improves relevancy, while cutting waste - efficiently.

At Forrester, I worked with CMOs who were desperately seeking a way to understand how their media is impacting transactions. They knew certain markets were failing, but didn't know why, or how to change it. Hyper local is really a paradigm shift for so many marketers - yet it's really the safest and most accountable thing they can be doing with their marketing data and dollars. The term "hyper-local" may be flashy, but the concept is very solid and accountable.