Placecast in LBS Ads Deal with Eventful

Among the many flavors of online ad targeting, there are geotargeting, behavioral targeting, contextual targeting and demographic targeting. 1020/Placecast aims to subsume most of these under the concept of “place,” which is not the same as location in the mind of CEO Anne Bezancon. Place is more specific but also broader and potentially incorporates more elements — time of day, demographics, context — in addition to location.

This morning the company announced a “cross-platform” ad deal with Eventful, which includes desktop (including email) and mobile (Eventful has an iPhone app). According to the release:

Placecast enables Eventful to segment site visitors based upon the location of specific events, significantly increasing advertising revenue opportunities through premium location-based inventory. In addition to advanced targeting, Placecast brings the expertise of a dedicated sales team, which collaborates with Eventful’s direct sales force.

Placecast adds a new dimension to audience targeting by using location-based information provided by publisher sites. This allows advertisers to deliver messages customized to a specific audience and a specific location, increasing the relevancy of these ads and therefore the value of the publisher’s inventory. Using proprietary targeting algorithms, Placecast delivers more relevant ads by matching publisher data with information specific to an event venue in which a user expresses interest. For example, a user checking Eventful’s site for the next Coldplay concert in New York City would see an ad for Scion with the address and link to the closest Scion dealership, while a user looking for outdoor activities in San Francisco would see a localized ad for Subaru.

Placecast tries to use any available location-aware technology or data to deliver place-based ads. In the example provided above, there’s a combination of demographic and local targeting going on, based on the younger demographic profile of most Eventful users.

As the technical barriers to location awareness come down — more on that later — the challenge becomes having enough of the right kind of ad inventory to serve ads that can take full advantage of Bezancon’s notion of “place.” (There’s probably enough “local” ad inventory today in one sense but it’s not centrally available for all to tap into.) This will require dynamic delivery of ad creative, such as what Yahoo is seeking to do with ShopLocal/PointRoll and Publicis (in mobile). Ads will need to be parsed into components so that they can be changed on the fly, depending on the audience, location, behavior, etc.

That dynamic, templated ad model is still somewhat experimental. By contrast the beauty of search is that it’s directional and so there’s some manifestion of consumer interest and intent — and the system doesn’t have to work quite as hard to deliver relevant ads.

Totally Slammed

I’m so buried with work I’m struggling to get posts done. I’m also obsessing about the political situation, which is slowing me down.

I spent some time at Google yesterday (2nd time there in as many days) and had a deeper dive on what’s going on with location awareness in mobile and on the desktop with Google’s new geolocation API and Chrome.

So there’s lots to talk about — later.

New Posts at Local Mobile Search

Meanwhile over at Local Mobile Search:

• Jingle Launches “Connect” Ad Network to Increase Reach
• iPhone Continues Browser Gains
• Qpons (SMS Alerts) for Small Businesses
• Study: Mobile Lifts Brand Awareness
• Microsoft to Develop Own ‘Apps Store’ for Windows Mobile
• Of Touch Screen Kiosks and Mobile Tablets

Android Apps Winners: Lots of Local

Google announced the winners of its Android Developer Challenge contest. There were two categories: $275K and $100K winners. Fifty finalists were competing for the prizes. Twenty developers are dividing the cash awarded.

Among the 10 companies awarded $275K, six have location as a core or significant element. Only one of the $100K winners falls into that category. Among the other announced finalists, 14 out of 30 feature location or have location as a core element. When the iPhone Apps Store initially launched in late July, we surveyed the location-based applications (.pdf file).

Among the more intriguing location-based Anrdoid applications are two that allow users to scan product barcodes in local stores and do price comparisons, as well as determine other stores that may have the product nearby. GoCart and Compare Everywhere offer these capabilities.

The rest of this post is at Local Mobile Search.

Sprint Gets Ready to XOHM

Sprint has formally announced its XOHM (pronounced zoam) WiMAX mobile broadband service. It will launch in Baltimore, MD in September. WiMax faces a challenge from LTE, which AT&T and Verizon have adopted as their 4G network standard. But WiMax is out of the gate sooner. Consumers, of course, don’t care about any of this. They just want access on the go.

XOHM will eventually be incorporated into Clearwire, the mobile broadband provider majority owned by Sprint but also invested in by Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks.

Sprint has done a very interesting set of deals with local content providers to offer localized information on the startpage/homescreen for subscribers.

The rest of this post is at Local Mobile Search.

Dex Uses DNC to Promote Itself

RHD’s (Denver-based) Dex put out a release to coincide with the beginning of the Democratic National Convention (in Denver) as a reminder to people that it’s a valuable resource for local information in print, online and in mobile (1-800-Call-DEX [via CallGenie]).

I haven’t spoken to RHD/Dex in some time. I’m wondering how the 800-Call-Dex offering is going?

Trulia Mobilizes, Adds Features

Trulia has launched an iPhone App but is pursuing a broader mobile strategy by launching on a range of devices, including BlackBerry and PND “platform” DASH.

The value of being able to check for listings on the go is obvious. The extension to DASH is also a smart move, so to speak.

The company has also launched a local news feed on the homepage, which CEO Pete Flint, in an email to me, likened to the Facebook news feed. The company already had RSS-based alerts, but this is a broader tool/data feed.

Finally the company has launched blogging in its Voices section. Something of an extension of (or successor to) the Q&A functionality launched last year (”Voices”) it offers realtors, the ones who will use it most, the opportunity to “brand” themselves as experts and gain leads accordingly.

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Recently I noticed that Trulia competitor Zillow had added Google StreetView images to its listings pages, although I can’t find one now. Trulia did this to much fanfare in April.

Fire Eagle Redux

I made an earlier post about the launch of Fire Eagle but had to pull it because I blew the embargo inadvertently (too much stress impacting short term memory). I consolidated my two posts, here and SEL, into one post over at Search Engine Land.

In short, Fire Eagle is cool and useful and part of a growing “location infrastructure” online and in mobile.

Here’s the press release.

Saving Newspapers

Today’s “Locals Only” column, which I’m taking a break from, at Search Engine Land is about the challenges newspapers face — written by Marchex COO John Keister.

Keister lays out the situation and alludes, at the end, to some of the local SEM efforts that a few newspapers have  undertaken. To date most of those have been with WebVisible. If newspapers were smart they would do a range of things:

• Agressively embrace (and monetize) mobile (See AP/Verve). Get out in front of this medium
• Mimic the YP industry and sell search marketing, websites, video, etc.
• Leverage any and all relevant ad networks (Centro, Yahoo, quadrantOne, etc.) to get more money from their sites
• Participate in Google Print
• Add community to their flagship sites (via Topix, CityVoter); improve usability and site search
• Build other types of sites: verticals, mom sites, unconventional hybrids, neighborhood level sites. If they can’t build ‘em in house, partner with those (e.g., Outside.in) who can
• Get more deeply into local shopping (via local inventory data providers)
• Syndicate their content and ads widely. Adopt the “agency” model, vis-a-vis advertisers, that YP has.

This sounds like a “hodge podge” of to-dos. But unfortunately they’ve got to fight the war on many fronts to survive. But it probably is already “too late” for some metro dailies.

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Here’s an interesting, related piece from Editor & Publisher on new business and ownership models (non-profit, coop, etc.) for newspapers.

RippleTV at the Bagel Store

I was picking up bagels this morning after my virtuous trip to the gym and discovered that a RippleTV screen had been installed in my local Noah’s Bagels. It’s the fruit of this agreement, announced in July. The screen in this particular store was placed above the coffee self-service station.

In the left column are sports scores; in the right stock quotes. News and entertainment-news items rotate in the top and bottom horizontal panels framing the photograph. In the center were news photos, many (or perhaps all) with New York Times branding.

During the roughly 10 minutes I watched the screen I saw solicitations in the center frame that encouraged local dry cleaners and hair salons to advertise by going to RippleTV.com. I also saw an ad/review for an upcoming film, with a local theater listing and showtimes. And I saw local traffic information and several local weather forecasts.

I’ve written about Ripple several times in the past but had never seen an actual screen.

Here are some quick thoughts. . .

This is going to have a local branding dimension and be good for a wide range of local businesses:

• Realtors
• Hair salons
• Contractors
• Nail salons
• Independent clothing and sporting equipment stores
• Nurseries
• Others in a several mile radius, basically zip-wide

There’s also a direct response dimension, which will be good for:

• Sales/deals at local pharmacies or grocery stores
• News paper circular content (which includes local big boxes)
• Movies and showtimes

Ripple CEO Ali Diab told me some time ago that the company had run a test with Walgreens (a pharmacy) in which there was a mobile/text call to action to receive a coupon. He said it was quite successful.

Mobile should definitely be integrated more extensively into RippleTV. Yet any call to action associated with a URL will get some degree of response as well given the proliferation of iPhones and smartphones, especially in specific US metro areas like the SF Bay Area where I live.

For example, a movie review and/or preview with a prompt to buy tickets from Fandango or another site could well generate purchase behavior on the spot via a mobile device. And newspaper circular coupons and information, promoted a day or two before Sunday — especially if people can text to get the coupons on their mobile phones — might well get people to respond to those offers and head into local stores. (Think about the immediate tracking possibilities of this situation.)

Regardless, the screen and the graphics were eye catching and impressive but it cried out for “interactivity.” The images and experience is quite Internet-like, which is why I’m talking about mobile in this context. The combination of RippleTV’s local screens and location-specific advertising with mobile creates an entirely new set of possibilities for advertisers. It’s very interesting.

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Here’s some related Nielsen data on in-mall advertising, lift and recall:

47% of mall shoppers viewed content provided on the Adspace Mall Network on Smart Screens displaying 10 best deals in the mall weekly. Of those, 34% had an average recall of specific ads they saw on the network.

Is ChaCha ‘Imploding’ or Growing?

A post on TechCrunch yesterday suggested ChaCha was cutting the pay rate of its human guides to save costs as a prelude to “implosion.” When I had last spoken to ChaCha the company had presented a very different picture so I decided to investigate and contacted co-founder Brad Bostic.

Bostic told me that ChaCha had been seeing near triple digit growth in query volume and that the company was beginning to introduce advertising, having done a successful mobile campaign with Coke around MyCokeRewards in connection with a Nascar event. He also said ChaCha was gearing up for mobile commerce.

Regarding the compensation of guides, Bostic said that the company was trying to improve the compensation of efficient and successful guides and do the opposite with those who weren’t performing. He told me this was just another step in an ongoing process of refining their compensation system.

Based on my history of conversations with Bostic and dealings with ChaCha I have no reason to doubt the veracity of what he’s telling me. But if one was a skeptic one might want additional, “empirical” confirmation of Bostic’s growth claims. I asked the company for some data.

Here’s a range of information that ChaCha provided to me:

• Millions of queries per month
• 90% month on month query growth from Jan-June
• Over 10,000 new users per day
• Over 25,000 guides in the system

Advertising:

• Early advertising trials showed 5.2% conversion rates in mobile
• ChaCha also said that Nielsen Mobile found that Google SMS has approximately 37 million queries per month. This was achieved over a period of several years
• ChaCha’s “mobile answers” service launched in January this year and the company said it expects to hit 30 million queries by December, this year

User profile:

• 53% are repeat users
• 83% say they consider mobile ChaCha to be “very valuable”
• Average usage now more than 30 times per month. Compare average mobile search volume is nine times per month
• 88% hear about the service from a friend
• Users are 18-34; use it socially and for utilitarian purposes

These data are from the company and I don’t have independent verification. But based on my experience I don’t have reason to doubt their accuracy. The stats are impressive and indicate that ChaCha is growing rather dramatically.

ChaCha began as a desktop search tool that was a very strong concept but offered relatively weak execution. But that has totally changed in mobile.

As a case-in-point, I was at a ShopLocal conference recently. In the evening we had a dinner event on a boat on Lake Michigan. Among the attendees were higher-ups from comScore, including Chairman Gian Fulgoni and EVP Linda Abraham.

Abraham was carrying an interesting purse. She was able to change the “skins” to match outfits or for different occasions. I asked her who invented it: whether it was a man or woman. She didn’t know. We searched on the mobile versions of the major search engines and were unable to find the information. I called ChaCha and it successfully provided an answer. In another situation there was a question and debate about how many employees Google had. Mobile ChaCha provided a definitive answer more quickly than could be discovered through conventional mobile searching.

On the desktop users can do dozens of searches quickly themselves, so ChaCha wasn’t as useful as it is in mobile where it’s painful to search multiple times and wade through links and the text of webpages in turn.

TheFind Introduces iPhone App

We got time with TheFind CEO Siva Kumar a couple of weeks ago in anticipation of the company’s iPhone launch. The company has formally announced its iPhone app and it’s likely to be a game changer for TheFind, which is a terrific engine but has had limited consumer awareness on the desktop.

TheFind is sourcing local inventory data from Krillion and NearbyNow and will bring that information to the iPhone, together with the phone’s location awareness. (Slifter offers a less elegantly presented version of this content.) That means individuals out and about will be able to determine what store near them has the desired pair of Brooks running shoes or the particular flat-panel TV they’re interested in.

When they’re in store X and it’s out of a particular item people will thus be able to check and see if another nearby store offers the same or a comparable product. There’s also nice continuity between the desktop and mobile in the app.

Mobile users are already doing in-store price comparisons on mobile devices and TheFind’s new iPhone app represents a more complete mobile shopping experience.

The rest of this post is at Local Mobile Search.

More on Local Apps for the iPhone

In case anyone wasn’t paying attention, the era of (casual) mobile gaming has arrived. The top iPhone apps in both the free and paid categories are almost entirely games. Also noteworthy, Facebook has jumped to number nine, ahead of the Google search app, which is at number 15.

This itself may be something of a metaphor for the way that mobile will play out: general search as secondary to social features or capabilities. I wrote about this in my LMS report “Will Google Dominate the Mobile Web?”

Beyond this, I tried at launch in early July to capture the apps that used location or where location was an important part of the app: Survey of Local iPhone Apps. At that time I found that roughly 10% of the apps were location aware or tried to leverage location in some way. Now, with over a thousand apps I’ve stopped counting.

Luckily Skyhook Wireless, which offers “hybrid positioning” based on GPS, cell tower and WiFi triangulation, has taken the baton and is tracking and categorizing them. According to Skyhook’s count, local apps now are at about 90 and are thus just under 10% of total apps available on the device.

Another interesting app is SpeechCloud Voice Dialer, which overcomes the lack of voice dialing in the hardware itself. This has been there for a few weeks, but I just noticed it.

Lots more voice search/voice control apps and plug-ins are coming to the iPhone in the near term. Dan Miller wrote about some of that in this short report, iPhone 3G Inspires Voice Application Demos.

From Directory to ‘Connectory’

At a WhitePages.com-sponsored “blogger day” last week, I and LMS colleague Pete Headrick, had a chance to hear about where the company’s been and where it’s going: interesting places. It was preceded by a Mike Arrington-moderated discussion about the iPhone and several iPhone apps (Urbanspoon, Jott, and WhitePages). The demos and initial discussion were interesting but the conversation ultimately devolved into an iPhone vs. Android debate. The Seattle PI covered it here.

WhitePages.com is a terrifically successful business, selling (mostly display) advertising against its huge traffic and network — the company has relationships with most US yellow pages publishers and a range of others, including MSN. It also owns a range of brands/destinations in the US and Canada, including Address.com, PhoneNumber.com and 411.com.

The company also claims roughly 40 million monthly uniques. The most recent comScore “Top 50″ US sites shows WhitePages.com at 42. But comScore likely counts traffic to WhitePages lookups on partner sites as belonging to those partners (e.g., Superpages). WhitePages’ database of people listings (collected through various methodologies) now is roughly 180 million according to the company. WhitePages says this is orders of magnitude larger than anyone else.

If my notes are correct, CEO Alex Algard said the site made something approaching $70 million in 2007. It’s a very profitable but not too sexy business. Part of the reason for the blogger day was to announce the company’s new direction. Consistent with that new direction WhitePages recently bought voice platform Snapvine.

What was most interesting to me, beyond the impressive metrics was this conceptual shift from directory to what the company is calling a “connectory.” What does that mean? It means a medium or hub for direct communications between people. As opposed to simply looking up names — the company cited a range of data on usage frequency — soon users will be able to leave voicemail messages for one another or send text messages to registered users’ cellphones, all via the site.

To that end, WhitePages is trying to get people to register and provide more content, including their cellphone numbers. The number can be exposed or concealed by the user. If it’s concealed, there’s the option to send a text message to that person, which they’ll receive on their cell. (Most users are likely to opt-out of showing their cell numbers.) Voicemail functionality (via Snapvine) is coming soon.

There are lots of directions the company could go: into free 411, into social networking, into local search more directly. But it has said that it’s not going into those areas, although people do use the site for business lookups frequently. But the directions it is going are pretty interesting.

If WhitePages is successful creating a national cellphone database that allows people to be contacted while giving them real privacy controls it will really be a coup. But beyond this the new “connectory” functionality is very interesting generally. People can start using the site as a way to contact one another using voice or text messaging. That transforms the otherwise useful but sleepy directory site into something much more dynamic and integrated into to people’s daily lives.

There was another intriguing product that was briefly, almost subliminally previewed (it came and went so fast) but it wasn’t “bloggable.”

New Posts at Local Mobile Search

Here are a few recent posts from Local Mobile Search:

• iPhone Apps Cross 1K Mark
• Slifter Now on iPhone, Blackberry, Desktop
• Quova Acquires Verifia; Poised to add More Metadata
• iPhone 3G Inspires Voice Application Demos
• Is There an ‘Internet Tablet’ in Your Future?
• Verizon Q2: 70 Bn SMS Messages, Wireline Down
• Sprint Introduces Personalization and Google Search
• Jingle and MapQuest in Reciprocal Branding Push
• AdMob Launches iPhone Marketplace
• iPhone for ‘the Rich,’ Android ‘the Masses’

New YP Reality: Leverage All Channels

MediaPost has another story this morning that I find interesting, largely about YellowPages.com. It’s about YellowPages.com’s new ad campaign and “three screen strategy”: Internet, TV and mobile — in addition to the traditional medium. Here’s perhaps the most interesting paragraph of the piece:

The company typically experiences double-digit searches from consumers on handsets during those two days [the weekend]. “The majority of all searches on our Web site come from mobile handsets, compared with online,” Crowley says.

That’s an amazing statement. If I read it right, most of the weekend traffic to YellowPages.com is coming from mobile phones.

Where once all “traffic” came from the print directory, now it must come from a range of sources:

• Video (online and U-verse for AT&T)
• Internet (destination site, network and search)
• Mobile (WAP, SMS, iPhone, application), also 1-800-Yellowpages

This is itself a snapshot of the fragmented media marketplace and how YP publishers can position themselves to “put Humpty Dumpty back together” for local advertisers if they’re agressive and smart. Simulatenously, they’ve got to get traffic from anywhere and everywhere to make up for print usage declines.

See for example, this slide from G5 Search Marketing’s Dan Hobin (presented at SMX Local-Mobile):

Look at the relative cost per lead and number of customers generated by each of the media types used. These are real data points and results from one of Hobin’s customers.

Let me qualify this: this is just one customer in one market (I believe). Hobin said that print YP was working much better than this in certain markets. But it indicates the softness in usage in selected areas and the need for YP publishers to “diversify” traffic sources.

Interestingly Superpages and Yahoo deliver better cost-per-lead than general Google search results, but the volumes are considerably less.

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Correction: Earlier today a YellowPages.com spokesperson contacted me and said the following (via email):

I wanted to clarify re: the MediaPost article this morning (covered on Screenwerk) - as Matt Crowley was misquoted on the web vs. mobile traffic.

So, disappointingly, the statement about mobile traffic apparently is incorrect.

Local Inventory for the iPhone

I’ve written quite a bit in the past about the rise in local product inventory data or its proxy and how this is really what consumers want: to know if particular products they’re interested in are available in local stores. Here’s a site dedicated to that proposition and the iPhone (data are crawled from the Apple site):

iPhone availability has been a become an issue in the wake of the successful launch of the 3G version. So it’s valuable to have access to something like this. But this is just one instance of a much larger trend, which we’ll be talking about on the SMX Local-Mobile panel “Local-Mobile & Retail.”

New over at Local Mobile Search

Here are a few recent posts from Local Mobile Search:

• Yahoo Emphasizes LMS
• AT&T See Strong Wireless Growth, Has Voice for iPhone
• Toward a More Useful Twitter
• DMA Study on Mobile Marketing Presents Mixed Picture
• Bango: Uniques Most Important Metric
• CallGenie in Ads Deal with Broadcaster Media
• Audacious TechCrunch Tablet Project
• Qik Now in Public Beta, on iPhone
• Opera Releases New Mobile Browser

Death to ‘Pizza’ and ‘Starbucks’

I don’t mean that literally. But “pizza” and “Starbucks” are often used as pseudo-archetypal examples for local search on the desktop and for local mobile search respectively.

I always try and use “sushi” instead of “pizza” because pizza is boring and people aren’t really looking for pizza all that often. How many times in any given month are you eating pizza? Raise your hand if it’s more than once.

Then there’s Starbucks, which is closing 600 locations and will thus be somewhat harder to find “going forward” (so we’ll need those GPS-powered apps to get us there).

There has been no other US business — save perhaps the unsavory McDonald’s — that was so ubiquitous as Starbucks, hence its use as an example.

Now we’ll have to find something else — the UPS store?

Newspapers Still Dominant Coupon Source

Coupon interest and usage in the US is growing, which makes sense in a bad economy. But Internet couponing has been on the rise, with 83% growth since 2005 according to Scarborough Research.

Source: Scarborough Research

CPG companies have always been ambivalent about online couponing because of fraud concerns, which has held back growth. All that all may be changing, as a range of factors align to build awareness of a big opportunity online and in mobile.