Advertisers will spend 17.8% of online ad budgets for local this year -- up from 14.9%, or $13.5 billion, according to a report by Borrell Associates. The Benchmarking Local Online Media: 2010 Revenue Survey points to mobile as the catalyst driving growth. While local advertising reached $90.4 billion across all media in 2010, mobile will drive local advertising through 2015. Borrell estimates that within five years, two-thirds of the $24 billion in local online advertising -- up from $18 billion in 2012 -- will arrive on mobile devices such as tablets, smartphones, and GPS-enabled laptops. Pure-play Internet companies that offer the best technologies are partnering with legacy media companies with the best local sales forces and promotional strength. Companies like Yahoo, Google, Local.com, Groupon, Zillow, Monster and others find it more productive and lucrative to work with legacy media companies than to compete. In 44 of more than 200 markets Borrell tracks, Groupon or Autotrader. com generate more revenue than the largest local newspaper, TV or radio station online operation in that market, according to the study. This year, about two dozen of Groupon's local offices will generate more than $10 million each. Craigslist brought in about $20 million from its New York location, and about $1.6 million each in Phoenix and Houston. Autotrader.com brings in more than $10 million per site in more than two dozen cities. The study, which analyzes 4,588 U.S. and Canada online operations and advertising projections in 2011, suggests that market share held by pure-play Internet companies has stopped growing. While they held the lion's share of local online ad dollars from zero to 48% between 2000 and 2008, growth for them slowed. The biggest have been forced to form partnerships with local newspapers, TV, radio and directories. AT&T YP.com, Autotrader.com, Groupon, CareerBuilder.com, YP.com in Canada, and Monster.com derive content from their own advertisers. Autotrader.com and Groupon expect to see their respective revenue in the U.S. exceed $1 billion this year. The remainder in the top five should see revenue between $400 million and $475 million. AT&T experienced a 125% increase in mobile searches across the YP Local Ad Network in 2010, according to AT&T Interactive Analytics. The division also estimates YP.com attracts over 30 million monthly online unique visitors. The report points to AT&T's YP.com as an example of a Yellow Page company making a quick adoption, and benchmarks a variety of traditional platforms from newspaper to television to radio.
Americans who dream about having a Porsche in their garage don't have to envision leaving it there until the weekend. That's the message of a new campaign that eschews mountain roads and high-speed driving imagery for real-life experiences. The campaign, "Engineered for Magic. Everyday," shows people doing such very unsportscar-like activities with Porsches like picking up kids from school and getting groceries. No, the Atlanta-based U.S. arm of the sports car maker isn't rolling out a turbocharged minivan to go with the Cayenne SUV. Rather, the effort, via Chicago-based AOR Cramer-Krasselt, is designed to promulgate the idea that if you buy one of Porsche's roadsters or sports cars, you aren't relegating yourself to a life of wistful glances at the garage each morning before slumping into your four-door appliance with a baleful sigh for the drive to work or the shopping center. Scott Baker, marketing manager for Porsche Cars North America (PCNA), explains that the campaign follows a raft of market research showing that potential customers might be balking at the idea of buying a car just to let it sit around. "We asked people what was keeping them from considering [a Porsche car and they said,] 'I don't feel I will be comfortable driving in L.A. traffic; it doesn't have new technology that I need to manage my everyday life; it doesn't have space to take people with me.' And so that really kind of solidified this understanding that, from an everyday drivability standpoint, people don't think we are relevant," he says. Baker adds that to alter this perception the company took a TV, print, online, mobile, direct mail and in-cinema "swarming" approach. "We are trying to overcome the perception that they can't drive a Porsche car in everyday situations, and to overcome that we need to show several pieces of evidence," says Baker, adding that the TV vector of the campaign includes both the 30-second ad and a series of 15-second vignettes showing how relevant Porsche cars are to everyday circumstances. The TV advertisements will run on national cable channels like History, ESPN and Discovery, and print will appear in April issues of newspapers and magazines such as The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Fast Company and Condé Nast Traveler. Headlines include, "Turns small errands into short adventures" and "Passion should never take a snow day." The automaker is also using the effort to launch a consumer-content website similar in scope to [and inspired by the success of, per Baker] the ongoing Porsche Family Tree site (PorscheFamilyTree.com) it introduced for the launch of its first sedan, the Panamera, in 2009. The PorscheEveryday.com site pairs professionally produced videos and images with owner-submitted content in mosaic style. To prime the content pump, Porsche gave out 200 Flip video cameras to owners with the suggestion that they contribute videos. The brand has also tapped Porsche Club of America, dealers and their customers, and its million-plus Facebook fans Porsche also has partnered with the Reelz channel for a program to get amateur filmmakers to create short films about "daily magic." The best of them will be shown before feature films in Spotlight cinemas around the country. Baker says the short-film element came from Porsche's insistence on using media partners as more than distribution channels. "When we RFP for partners we expect a lot out of them -- it's going to be predicated on how well they understand not just our audience but exactly what we are trying to communicate," says Baker. "If we can get media properties to be not only amplifiers but content partners, that becomes another huge leverage for the campaign."
IBM is committed to "integrating Web analytics across channels," said Yuchon Lee, vice president/GM IBM Enterprise Marketing Management Group, and co-founder of Unica, in a keynote address at OMMA Metrics Wednesday morning. IBM, he said, has spent $2.5 billion in the space in the past year, all through acquisitions, including that of Unica, bought six months ago. During the next four years, Lee continued, IBM plans to spend another $20 billion on such acquisitions. Separately, on Monday, IBM launched a campaign for what it calls "Smarter Commerce," described as a "new category" addressing "the spectrum of enterprise commerce activities -- new ways to buy, sell and secure greater customer loyalty in the era of mobile and social networks." Combining CRM (customer relationship management), ERP (enterprise resource planning) and SCM (supply chain management) will result in the "next generation enterprise platform for business," Lee said. An IBM survey of more than 1,000 chief marketing officers -- with a budget that Lee says dwarfs last year's Unica outlay -- is now underway, as IBM strives "to develop best practices, services and solutions." Lee said that Web analytics is "at the center" of all of it, and pointed to three key cross-channel marketing trends: * Digitization of all channels, in addition to online. Such channels, he said, include kiosks, interactive billboards and point of sale, and tie into IBM's initiative for universal tags.
According to the Performics 2011 Mobile Search Insights Study, conducted by ROI Research, focusing on people who use the mobile Web at least weekly, 57% use the mobile Web more than once/day, with 77% using mobile search more than five times in the last month. Overwhelmingly, satisfaction and adoption of mobile search holds true throughout the study:
The Federal Trade Commission seems to have stepped up its privacy enforcement efforts lately, but hasn't yet taken action regarding mobile privacy. But that could potentially change. The FTC's Maneesha Mithal, director of the division of privacy and identity presentation, told attendees at a Fordham Law event today that, even though the agency lacks jurisdiction over common carriers, it can take enforcement actions against app developers that engage in deceptive practices. What kinds of privacy practices would the FTC consider deceptive? Mithal said two recent cases offered insight. First, the FTC is concerned when companies don't keep users' data secure -- as happened when Twitter security glitches resulted in hackers gaining access to some users' names, passwords and private messages. The agency recently finalized a settlement with Twitter stemming from that data breach. Secondly, she says, failing to live up to promises in privacy policies can trigger FTC action. The agency recently settled with ad network Chitika for telling users they could click on a link to opt out of online behavioral targeting, but then setting those opt-outs to expire after only 10 days. (Chitika said in a statement that it had intended to set the opt-out link to last for 10 years.) Beyond that, while the FTC would like to see mobile app developers take privacy-friendly steps -- like shedding information as soon as it's no longer needed, and notifying cell phone users about data collection -- the agency doesn't appear to have the authority to force the issue. Arguably, however, mobile devices pose more of a privacy threat than cookie-based targeting, because cell phones are almost always tied to just one specific person. What's more, cell phones carry unique device identifiers, which allow app developers and other companies to recognize the phone even if the owner attempts to opt out of targeting. Even though the FTC can't presently tell app developers how to protect consumers' privacy, the agency might well be able to do so in the future. Former presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) is floating a bill that, if enacted in its current form, would empower the FTC to craft new regulations regarding privacy across a variety of platforms. At present another former candidate, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), is listed as the co-sponsor.
This week, photo-sharing start-up Color made huge news by securing a boatload of venture capital, banking on the idea that people in close proximity to one another will want to share photos. CEO Dan Nguyen said that Color was designed to be used with groups, but its effect is often to connect strangers through their photos on their mobile phones. Connecting strangers through an Internet connection has, in the past, gone terribly wrong. Take Chatroulette as an obvious example, where the service could not be used without encountering an anonymous man exposing himself on your screen. Despite its pitfalls, there was something extremely powerful about connecting with a stranger, webcam-to-webcame, and Nguyen's startup takes advantage of that draw while decreasing the risk of inappropriate conduct with two methods. The first: by adding proximity as an element that dilutes the anonymity of the interaction, thus decreasing the likelihood of bad behavior. The second, by further structuring the type of communication allowed -- although it's pretty easy to be offensive with a single image, it's still a bit harder than it is through video with a full audio connection. Gaming offers an even more structured way to interact with people on the Web. Online gamers are completely familiar with interacting with strangers online; indeed it's one of the chief pleasures and pitfalls of online gaming to meet interesting strangers who may be profanity-spewing psychotics or actually pretty friendly chaps. But some games -- Words With Friends, a popular iPad/iPhone Scrabble-like game springs to mind -- can be played without any communication at all. Playing games with people at the same location as you could be an entertaining way to pass the time and even make connections with strangers, without Chatroulette-like risks of offensive content. A great example of this can be seen on Delta's in-flight gaming options. A trivia game allows users to compete against the rest of the plane to answer various general knowledge questions, and users are identified by a self-chosen nickname plus their seat number. You can play against your fellow passengers in relative anonymity, but if you have a competitive game that comes down to the wire, you can look across the aisle and make an actual connection. It's because the communication among those strangers begins in a structured way -- through the game -- that allows them to qualify one another for an actual, personal conversation, thus avoiding the pitfalls of platforms like Chatroulette.
In my life, search is fast becoming a better experience on a handset than it is on the web. In some ways the imperatives of the small screen, bandwidth constraints, and relevance appear to be driving the search providers to real innovation here. At the same time, mobility is driving me, the user, towards behaviors I wouldn't have expected to adopt when some search features were first rolled out. For instance, voice search is now my default input for the Google smartphone apps on iPhone and Android. The accuracy of the voice recognition combined with mobile search's tendency to look for local results is more likely to get me what I want sooner than typing into my desktop. Saying "movie times" or "sushi takeout" into the app will almost always get me details of nearby resources plus a phone link and directions in about five seconds. The recent usage stats from Performics showing that a high percentage of people who have used mobile search tend to use it frequently doesn't surprise me. I suspect that as more people explore the evolving feature sets on mobile search, they will adopt it very quickly as the shortest distance between two points. In the last week or so, both Google and Microsoft refreshed their mobile search product line. Google's iOS app adds sidebar menus that pop-in with a swipe and let you drill into vertical results more easily. A swipe down brings the search bar no matter where you are in the app. And the phone cam visual search is integrated next to the voice search. I don't know when the Apps search function slipped into Google's mobile search (also at m.google.com), but it is a welcome addition. You can do a search for an iPhone app from the browser, and the result will kick you over to its download page in the App Store. The more interesting renovations are going on at Bing's mobile site this week. Showing off HTML5 chops, the aim at Microsoft appears to be making the mobile Web experience feel like an app. Like the current smartphone versions of Bing, the mobile site superimposes a scroll of vertical search categories atop a pleasant image. With special effects like fade-ins for some screens and carousel menus, the Bing site offers an enticing glimpse of how engaging an HTML5-powered mobile Web can be. Bing clearly is trying to press its "decision engine" branding here and depart from some of the standard search categories. Many of its categories like Movies, Weather, and Direction are dropping you either into functionality that is well tuned to mobile -- or directly into actionable, location-sensitive information. For instance, "deals" is a prominent heading in the scroll, and it brings up a local map with highlighted discounts on everything from Burger King meals to bread-making supplies and paint. A lateral scroll atop the results lets me refine by category and even save results for later reference. While all of the classic search and portal providers like Google and Yahoo are also doing this, Bing seems to be most determined to pull content into the search experience rather than link out to it in standard Web fashion. The mobile Web experience aggregates more content than the others. For instance, Google's mobile Web site is more about pulling together all of the Google services like the Docs, Buzz, Reader, Calendars, etc. Bing on the other hand has a Weather link on its front page that pulls up the local forecast with much the same detail as one of the dedicated weather providers. You can even slide over to a range of maps and hourly breakdowns. Bing's Shopping function also pulls in user reviews into a bar chart of ratings. Google tends to emphasize online resources. I ran a "Hoover SteamVac" search on both engines. Bing gave me detailed user reviews and specs divided pretty well by model type. It was less strong on getting me to a purchase. Google was pushing retailers and promised that one of the models was in stock nearby. Clicking through to those links proved fruitless, however. Microsoft is not only making the mobile Web search engine feel more like its app counterpart, but arguably it is gathering for itself some of the functions standalone apps now serve. The weather, movies and deals buttons are executed well enough to pull some users away from dedicated apps if they wanted to make Bing an on-ramp to the mobile Web. In some sense this is the strategy that Yahoo had been trying for years on mobile, to revive the classic portal experience for mobile that became less relevant to Web surfers. The assumption is that people will want their content aggregated in one place for more efficient access on a handset. I think the jury will remain out on that one for a while as users still go through the process of discovering what their handset can do, and how these features fit within the rituals of everyday use. Bing's snazzy new HTML5 feature set is impressive to play with. And yet, can it break my newly formed reflex of barking search orders into my Google app?
According to the BIGresearch Simultaneous Media Usage Survey, mobile users who actively search for information, such as news, sports and TV/videos, are more likely than general consumers to conduct regular product research online. Active Searchers Search For Information About: All Adults 18+Those who:View News On CellView Sports On CellView TV/Video On Cell Automobiles/Trucks 9.1% 16.2% 18.7% 18.7% Clothing/Shoes 25.5% 37.3% 36.4% 40.1% Financial Information/Services 10.4% 17.4% 19.1% 18.7% Medical Information 16.3% 22.7% 23.4% 23.9% Comparative Shopping 28.2% 40.8% 38.3% 40.5% Source: BIGresearch, March 2011 Active Mobile Users (those who regularly or occasionally view News, Sports, or Video/TV on a cell phone) are more likely than Adults 18+ to regularly search online for information about automobiles/trucks, clothing/shoes and general comparison shopping. Frequency of Searching (% of Total Respondents; Regularly means routinely, as a set pattern; Occasionally means no set pattern, as mood suits.) All Adults 18+Those Who:View News On CellView Sports On CellView TV/Video On CellAutomobile/Trucks Regularly 9.1% 16.2% 18.7% 18.7% Occasionally 50.8% 57.7% 58.2% 57.3% Never 40.1% 26.2% 23.1% 24.0% Total 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% Regularly/Occasionally 59.9% 73.8% 76.9% 76.0% Clothing/Shoes Regularly 25.5% 37.3% 36.4% 40.1% Occasionally 53.0% 51.5% 53.0% 50.5% Never 21.4% 11.2% 10.7% 9.4% Total 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% Regularly/Occasionally 78.6% 88.8% 89.3% 90.6% Financial Information/Services Regularly 10.4% 17.4% 19.1% 18.7% Occasionally 39.7% 49.7% 50.9% 50.5% Never 49.9% 32.9% 30.0% 30.9% Total 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% Regularly/Occasionally 50.1% 67.1% 70.0% 69.1% Source: BIGresearch, March 2011 More Active Mobile Users could be searching for auto information because more of these consumers plan to purchase a vehicle in the next six months. Specifically, 23.3% of those viewing Sports, 22.4% of those viewing TV/Video and 20.1% of those viewing News on their mobile phones indicate they plan to buy/lease a car/truck in the near future, compared to 12.4% of Adults 18+. Just over half of Adults 18+ (56.6%) indicate they regularly or occasionally watch video commercials while waiting for video content to load. However, Active Mobile Users are much more likely to watch these ads. 76.0% who view TV/Videos, 74.7% in search of Sports, and 71.3% who view News on a cell phone regularly/occasionally watch pre-roll advertisements. Sponsored links are also more likely to influence Active Mobile Users. On a 5-point influence scale, sponsored links rate a 2.6 for mobile Sports and Video viewers, compared to a 2.2 among Adults 18+. When it comes to sharing online research findings, nearly 97% of all Active Mobile Users say they give advice about products and services, and word of mouth (face-to-face) is the most prominent means: Method Of Communicating With Others About A Service, Product Or Brand After Searching :Those whoCommunicationAll Adults 18+View News On CellView Sports On CellView TV/Video On Cell Face-to-Face 65.7% 68.8% 66.1% 68.0% Email 52.4% 59.6% 59.1% 60.0% Cell Phone 36.8% 55.4% 56.6% 58.5% Telephone (Landline) 32.2% 29.5% 28.9% 29.1% Text Messaging 24.3% 42.0% 41.9% 45.5% Source: BIGresearch, March 2011 Seek Advice From Others Before Buying ( Frequency Adults 18+ (24,754)Those who:Reg/Occ View News on CellReg/Occ View Sports on CellReg/Occ View Video/TV on Cell Regularly 18.5% 26.3% 27.9% 29.3% Occasionally 72.5% 67.8% 66.0% 64.8% Never 9.1% 5.9% 6.1% 6.0% Total 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% Regularly/Occasionally 90 9% 94 1% 93 9% 94 0% Give Advice To Others About Products Or Services Purchased Regularly 28.9% 42.5% 43.0% 46.1% Occasionally 65.3% 54.7% 53.6% 50.9% Never 5.8% 2.8% 3.4% 3.0% Total 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% 100.0% Regularly/Occasionally 94.2% 97.2% 96.6% 97.0% Source: BIGresearch, March 2011 (Regularly means routinely, as a set pattern; Occasionally means no set pattern, as mood suits) This analysis of consumer behavior provides marketers and advertisers with media consumption insights for more effective media allocation. Margin of error is +/- 0.9% at a 99% confidence level. For additional information and a complimentary report, please visit BIGresearch here.