Local Online Advertising to Nab $7.8 Billion by 2011, released by eMarketer today, sheds light on how far local advertisers have to go to reach their increasingly online audience. While the revenue crunch for newspapers and the stagnant state of the radio industry (overtaken by online this year in the US) is due to national advertisers moving their budgets online, $97 billion is still spent on offline local advertising. In many markets, the decline in offline usage is far outpacing online growth. The current projections look mainly at display and search ads, and rightly so, as they make up the lion’s share of local advertising options currently. But one would think that in the near future, a bevy of new options will be open to smaller businesses. Local bloggers are growing their audiences by leaps and bounds, with restaurant reviews, local events, community news, etc., and smaller businesses are usually a key component of the neighborhood. A blogger relationship program is low cost and high impact, especially when the marketer is a known personality. Likewise, when mobile finally finds a way to use GPS-enabled ads on a wider scale, the threat to radio potentially becomes much greater. While the barrier to entry with these mediums is more knowledge/comfort than financial, it is only a matter of time before spending accelerates to catch consumer adoption.

Advertising Age’s “What’s Plaguing Viral Marketing” is an interesting counterpoint to the excitement about viral marketing. Based on conclusions of research that discounts the importance of “influencers”, the article presents the idea that marketers are headed in the wrong direction focusing on finding the few people with disproportionate influence that will transform a campaign into a phenomena. It is true that majority of such campaigns fail to catch on, and too many marketers try to catch lightning in a bottle with me-too tactics that have worked for others without considering that what worked for sneakers might not be right for pet care. But this article goes even farther based on what I am sure is a very elaborate computer model. Tom Hespos gives a good overview on why creative shortcomings might be responsible for most viral campaigns falling short, versus concluding that good ol’ mass marketing is what brands should consider (which is oddly enough what the article seems to suggest). I think there is an even bigger hole in this line of thinking, however, and it is based on the assumption that influencers are solely individuals that interact with one community.

Without knowing the ins and outs of Mr. Watts’ model, and drawing on the experience that we have from creating and planning campaigns that get picked up and spread by users all the time, I can say with confidence that it over-simplifies the real world landscape by a large margin. First, the idea that that an influential individual is “several times” more influential than an average consumer is bizarre, considering that an “ordinary” person may or may not blog, and if they do, their average readership is usually less than 10. Most of the bloggers that marketers target have audiences in the tens of thousands or even millions, which would seem to indicate there is a large magnitude of difference between the model and reality. If this difference is because the research uses a flat, peer-to-peer network as its basis, fine, but the article should have mentioned it. Also potentially misleading is the idea that marketers focus on finding individuals as opposed to groups or communities. A person who’s opinion carries weight in one community might be meaningless in another, or may be regarded as scripture in yet another. Knowing what to place where is often more important than who, and only by having a comprehensive understanding about how different communities (vs individuals) feed each other can marketers change viral from hit-or-miss to a key part of their strategy. Users will embrace great ideas, and the challenge is having them in the right format at the right time, not so much hitting up the same .1% of the population over and over again (or hiring a network of people to chase them, for that matter). I don’t know many people in marketing who really believed that if you found the 10 super-influencers you could collect your check and go home, but it is a stretch to apply an abstract model to a much more complicated environment.

Just a quick thought- I’ve been hearing and reading stories of marketers that are having problems conducting user-driven campaigns. A lot of this confusion seems to stem from the fact that companies are treating people like unpaid creative directors, and are expecting them to create :30s or print ads around products, and then fret that the results don’t accurately reflect the brand. Some of the thinking on this has been along the “You get what you pay for” line of thought, but I actually think that is secondary. Question: When was the last time you filmed a :30 to tell a friend what you thought? Or created a large visual with compelling copy? Users don’t speak in ad units, but the expectation is that non-traditional creative will be carried by traditional media, which is a large part of the disconnect. Most videos on YouTube aren’t :30 seconds long for a reason- people are done when they’re done, and though 99.9% of what is created is of middling/poor quality, it is far more genuine. The trick lies in loosening the creative restraints, and looking at vehicles that users are comfortable with already, not just in terms of media, but especially in format.

An interesting post on ProBlogger about the average age for blogs in the Technorati Top 100 is 33.8 months (roughly 2 1/2 years).  An interesting point for those looking for commonality among consistantly popular blogs.

While I don’t really tend to cover current events, the blogging (and the Flickring, and the YouTube activities, etc) going on about the Thailand coup is fascinating. Of course, this post sums up the activity better than I ever could.

Micro Persuasion has a rundown on an article in that latest issue of Wired detailing the problem of Spam Blogs (Splogs). We’ve all done a search in Technorati or Google Blog Search, only to click through a few of the results and realize we’ve been hit with a spam blog. The Wired article highlights several key pieces of information about splogs - including that Blooger hosts over 100,000 spam blogs alone. MP has some suggestions for getting rid of splogs, particularly where it hurts - the advertising networks, essentially calling for ad networks to require that publishers prove they are legit before they can join. Can we all say “Yes!” - there’s nothing I can imagine more futile than doing a buy via Adwords, etc, only to get your ads on a splog.

Micro Persuasion is reporting that the Washington Post has kicked off a new Blog advertising network, called the Sponsored Blogroll. I really like how well the Post is integrating blogs and other UGM into the online component of their paper. Kudos, gang.