• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, September 8, 2010

Someday I am going to do a deep search of my own past columns and reporting just to gather all of the local online advertising stories I have written in the past 15 years of covering digital. Cracking that mom and pop shop ad budget has been as prized and as elusive to digital markets as the proverbial Holy Grail. Over the years I have seen outlandish scheme after outlandish scheme designed to educate the small service business sector that online was the way to go. One directory start-up I recall years ago tried to recruit anyone and everyone just to bang doors in their neighborhood to sell local online advertising.

But how do you get the plumbers to buy a keyword+zip or an enhanced directory listing when they themselves have so little time to spend in front of a computer? Or how do you hope to explain this new system of digital advertising when so many earnest and hard-working owners like Kate Mulleady of The Enchanted Florist tells an interviewer while pointing to her daughter "She just put me on HappyFace -- or what -- oh, on Facebook." Kat and daughter were part of a new Web video series promoting local advertising from WebVisible.

Local marketing services provider WebVisible has it right when they name this documentary "The Great Divide." In a novel and promising way, this series promotes WebVisible itself by dramatizing the disconnect between small businesses and digital marketing and highlighting its successes. Episode one of the series is just a set up piece about the basic conundrum: merchants generally don't get the Internet even though they know their customers are there. The series has a lead generation contest attached. Viewers can submit their own business challenge for a chance to win a local digital ad makeover from WebVisible.

The newly released second episode in the series follows truck hauler Willie Haynes as he uses local search ads with calls forwarded to his cell phone to turn his truck cab into an office.

The Great Divide - Episode 2 from WebVisible on Vimeo.

To its credit Webvisible has taken a step forward in unraveling the thorny topic of local online advertising. By focusing on video case studies, they dramatize how these solutions can help just about any size or kind of business. Like a good branded entertainment series, "The Great Divide" works best when it forgets to be promotional and lets the humanity and wisdom of the small business owner. While the first episode seemed to dwell a bit on the digital naiveté of many owners, the second underscored Willie's deeper understanding of who his customers really are and how they want to interact with him. The solution he favored put him in direct voice contact with customers as soon as possible because many customers needing his hauling services have rough stories (eviction, deaths, radical life changes). At its best the series could give us something that perhaps too much of the digital "revolution" forgot: the real solutions come from on the ground and very particular experiences with customers. Just because many local businesses still don't get digital doesn't mean they don't understand their business. Most of them were pulling a profit long before most Internet endeavors started to get into the black.