Concert promoter Live Nation and online ad network AdBrite have entered into a interesting, multi-year partnership that creates a platform for Live Nation’s online advertising — with a distinctly local focus. Live Nation does lots of local advertising in traditional media and is now moving some of those dollars online.

The new AdBrite powered portal is called “Live Nation eFan Finder” and it allows band managers and local Live Nation salespeople to see local online ad placements and track the performance of those ads. Below is a screenshot of the dashboard for one campaign:

The ad placements/inventory and targeting capabilities come from AdBrite’s network, which include geographic and demographic options (as the campaign above suggests). According to the release, “Live Nation’s local marketers are able to easily create and place tailored ad campaigns for the company’s concerts, utilizing geo-targeting and other advanced matching technologies to connect with music fans on AdBrite’s network of 50,000 web sites.”

AdBrite’s marketing VP Paul Levine, who previously ran Yahoo! Local, made the very interesting point to me that in addition to providing greater transparency than other ad networks this helps to solve a problem that plagues local online advertising. Local/SMB advertisers want to see their ads, which is difficult  in a dynamic online environment, and this addresses that challenge: advertisers can see the creative and precisely where the ads are running.

If you think of these band managers and local salespeople as SMBs, or franchisees in a sense (vis-a-vis Live Nation), you start to see how this model for AdBrite has potentially broader applications and implications.

CNN profiles the online ordering efforts of the nation’s largest pizza chains:

In the past seven years, Louisville-based Papa John’s International Inc. has made a lot of dough from online ordering — more than $1 billion to be exact.

The nation’s third-largest pizza delivery chain trumpeted the $1 billion milestone Wednesday, noting that its U.S. online sales have been growing at an average clip of more than 50 percent per year. In 2001, the chain’s online sales totaled $20.4 million. Last year, its online sales approached $400 million.

I write about it because “pizza” is the archetypal local search subject. But I also bring it up because this is very much like Circuit City or Wal-Mart’s “buy online, pick up in store” feature. It’s also like online booking for local businesses (e.g., HourTown, ZocDoc, GenBook, Booking Angel). So is this “e-commerce” or local commerce?

It’s a hybrid model that reflects the integration of the Internet with the “real world” and points the way to much more of this sort of thing in the future: online order taking with offline fulfillment.

The yellow pages publishers are all competing with one another online and to varying degrees offline. But what they need to do is sit down in a room and start working together. They’ve done it with “frenemies” Google and Yahoo!; so why can’t they do it with one another?

First, they need to support coordinated marketing for the industry that reflects a new multi-platform strategy: print, online and mobile. They’re all doing this to some degree independently with the net result being less visible and/or powerful than a joint effort. That consumer marketing will also get the message across to advertisers as well so it’s valuable for that reason too. (The conundrum here is that AT&T paid $100 million for the “brand” Yellowpages.com and probably doesn’t want to share any of that equity with anyone else.)

Then they all need to build a joint online ad network (as the newspapers are doing with Yahoo! and quadrantOne). They may even want to use a third party platform such as Adify or RightMedia to expand beyond IYP sites. The chief problem for any individual IYP is volume. Marketers like the conversion rates on IYP sites but almost uniformly want more volume. (That is not true for true SMB advertisers however.)

If the publishers could get together and pool their traffic they would go a long way toward accomplishing that. IYP publishers are using Google and Yahoo! as part of their extended “networks” but there is a difference there.

There are various local ad networks today:

• MediaSpan
• WorldNow
• Internet Broadcasting
• Quigo (now part of AOL)
• NNN
• quadrantOne
• Marchex
• Centro (not a network per se, but functions like one in some respects)
• Traditional ad networks offer geotargeting but are typically “blind” save AdBrite

Those criticisms may be less true for YP publishers and IYP sites but forming some sort of larger network would benefit them with certain groups and categories of advertisers – especially national advertisers or brands that have local outlets or franchises.

Once upon a time the YP industry was poised to come together in a portal strategy to compete with Google and Yahoo! in search. That never actually happened but now might be a good time to revisit an updated version of this idea.

To all those who’ve contacted me in email and/or are interested, session submissions are now open. Please see the agenda and related session descriptions and then submit your session pitches here (scroll).

If you’re coming and havent registered, you can do so here.

The conference is skewed toward tactical and practical information for SEMs and companies doing search marketing. There’s less of an emphasis on business outlook at this show.

Palore, which I’ve advised, some time ago changed its model from consumer plug in to data aggregator for third party destination sites. The company had been aggegating data from a range of sources, largely about restaurants. But it came to the conclusion that fighting the battle on the consumer front was too challenging. So the model was changed and the company is collecting data and licensing that to third party sites.

In the process of doing that they’re finding some interesting things. For example, the company recently was able to show the relative percentages of restaurants in US cities with websites:

An earlier post showed the relative depth of content for NYC restaurants among several competing consumer destinations:

The company is moving beyond restaurants into other local categories as well.

Jingle Networks’ 800-Free-411 for now is the “free DA” market leader. But it has been joined by a broad range of competitors:

• 1-800-GOOG411 (Google)
• 1-800-Call-411 (MSFT, Tellme powered)
• 1-800-Yellowpages (AT&T)
• 1-800-2ChaCha (”mobile answers”)
• 1-800-The-Info (Verizon)
• 1-800-555-Tell (Tellme)
• 1-800-555-5555 (potentially)

This also doesn’t include the voice-powered (or operator-assisted) mobile applications:

• Yahoo’s oneSearch with Vlingo
• MSFT Live Search with voice
• The Tellme client (a new version launches today for the Blackberry)
• V-Enable’s FreeMobile411

There’s also the mobile Internet itself, which competes with DA in some cases. In the future, mobile social networks may also address some of the queries that might have gone to DA (e.g., category searches). Right now the latter is quite speculative however.

Against that backdrop Jingle needs to continue to develop, market and differentiate its service if it hopes to stay ahead of this increasing competition. One way it has sought to do that is by offering Dial Directions service, which as of today is now available nationally: any location to any other location (by address or intersection).

The rest of this post is on Local Mobile Search.

At one point or another, most of the big online media companies have talked about buying Facebook. Yahoo is rumored to have made an early offer of almost $1 billion for the company, which was (obviously) turned down. But as the MicroHoo discussions appeared to be deteriorating, Microsoft apparently made some formal inquiries about Facebook’s willingness to be acquired, according to the Wall Street Journal.

There are a number of people who believe that buying Facebook for $15 billion (its purported valuation) would be a foolish move for Microsoft. That price tag would make it the largest acquisition in Microsoft history by about $9 billion (aQuantive was $6 billion), but still less than a third of the proposed $47 billion that Microsoft was prepared to pay for Yahoo.

When Facebook Platform was first announced in May of last year with Microsoft as one of its inaugural partners, it immediately struck me that Microsoft would eventually acquire the social network. Then, when Microsoft made its $240 million investment, it seemed the company was moving on a path toward that eventual outcome.

There are very few, if any, companies beyond Microsoft with the cash or the willingness to pay $15 billion for Facebook — not even Google. Its only other recourse would be an IPO. While that might quickly elevate the top executives at the company to the Forbes’ billionaires list, becoming a public company presents many challenges for Facebook.

The rest of this post is at SEL.

There’s lots going on in the real estate vertical. Here’s a roundup of some of the latest news over the past couple of days:

Homethinking has introduced a new mortgage center that provides interesting data and heatmaps on lending patterns through the US. Founded by former Jupiter analyst Niki Scevak, the site is cash flow positive without a dime of VC money. Impressive.

Here’s his post explaining the details of the new section.

Homethinking offers for sale home listings through a marketing partnership with Trulia, which is putting out data today about consumer attitudes toward foreclosures. The survey was conducted by Harris Interactive. Findings include the following:

• Almost 20% of men aged 18-34 don’t know what a foreclosure is Nearly 20% of single people don’t know what a foreclosure is More than 50% surveyed would consider purchasing a foreclosed home
• 70% of U.S. adults feel that there are negative aspects to purchasing a foreclosure
• Almost 50% of respondents cited hidden costs as a negative aspect to purchasing a foreclosed home
• 24% mentioned the possibility of the home losing value 23% considered the prospect risky
• 20% of U.S. adults said that having a personal connection with someone who lost their home to foreclosure is a negative aspect of purchasing a foreclosed home

Zillow also released data that showed the depressing state of home valuations in the US:

Not surprisingly, homeowners who purchased during a market peak are at most risk of being underwater on their mortgages. Of homeowners nationwide who purchased when U.S. home values peaked in 2006, one out of every two (51.6%) now owes more on their mortgage than their home is currently worth. For those who purchased in 2005 and 2007, the situation is only modestly better with nearly 42 percent and 45 percent, respectively, facing negative equity. By comparison, 16 percent of those who purchased in 2004 have negative equity, as do 7 percent of those who purchased in 2003.

This depreciation trend is driving lots of nasty behavior on the part of banks, which are freezing or reducing equity lines without much notice to consumers.

DotHomes, which launched in the US in January, says it passed the “2 million listings” mark. It crawls as its primary method of obtaining listings data. And real-estate site “beatyouthere” launched. While it claims to be differentiated on the basis of social media/community tools and capabilities there’s no there there, yet.

Finally, European real estate search engine Properazzi launched in the US.

___

I neglected to mention a slew of sites that have been around for awhile, started by Xooglers, that seek to address the rental market:

• www.rentmarketer.com
• www.rentbits.com
• www.apartmentmarketer.com

]]> http://gesterling.wordpress.com/2008/05/07/re-news-homethinking-trulia-zillow/feed/ gesterling http://gesterling.wordpress.com/2008/05/07/marchex-gains-beats-estimates/ http://gesterling.wordpress.com/2008/05/07/marchex-gains-beats-estimates/#comments Wed, 07 May 2008 10:49:31 +0000 Greg Sterling http://gesterling.wordpress.com/?p=3333

Marchex reported Q1 revenues and gained on advertiser growth:

Revenue was $37.0 million for the first quarter of 2008, compared to $34.2 million for the same period of 2007.

The company has also recently announced a series of deals with partners seeking to gain additional, qualified local traffic from its network.

The “market” still doesn’t really understand local and Marchex is struggling to educate the market and tell a coherent story about what it’s doing.

Once again, let’s be clear on what local is about: It’s NOT about yellow pages advertisers and SMBs, though that’s an important part of the story. It’s also NOT about “the long tail,” though that’s there too.

Local is first and foremost about transactions and the point of sale; it’s about where the money changes hands. E-commerce is a bit player in retail and the Shopatrons, Where2GetIts, Krillions, NearbyNows, ShopLocals, Channel Intelligences of the world threaten to marginalize it and further flatten its growth.

The Internet, fundamentally, is a “consideration” medium that helps consumers make buying decisions that are consummated offline (read: Local). Part of that is finding SMBs but it’s also about products and brands — in a big way. (See alternative segmentation of SMB market discussion.)

The future of advertising is about the smart integration of media — online and off — and better visibility and tracking of performance. Mobile integration with traditional media, inventory feeds and more complete end-to-end tracking will help make all this more transparent for folks eventually.

Ever since I left the Kelsey Group I’ve tried to re-frame the definition of local to more clearly expose what’s really going on with the Internet and consumers. Neither the advertisers, nor most of the ad networks, nor the publishers are yet advanced enough to fully respond to this reality — and opportunity.

But it’s coming.

Over in my parallel world — Local Mobile Search — here are some posts from today and the past 24 hours:

• 800-555-5555 Launches in Legal Vertical
• Kooaba: Another ‘Point and Click’ Company
• iPhone Previews Future Sales Strategy
• Truvo Launches Mobile Client with mobilePeople
• Sprint Scores Coup with WiMax Joint Venture
• What Will Happen to Sprint?
• Consumer Privacy Groups Try to Get in Front of Mobile Marketing
• Vodafone to Sell iPhone in 10 Global Markets
• HTC Replaces ‘Touch’ with ‘Diamond’