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.

From DM news, via MarketingVox: Internet may be a threat to local newspapers - while not a shock to anyone that has used craigslist, digg, Citysearch, or Google News before, the outlook is probably gets even worse as media evolves. I mean this not just from the shift of news consumption from dedicated news sites to news aggregators, but also from the growing incorporation of news feeds into social media platforms. With the recent hype around Google Reader on Facebook as an example, more and more users will consume their news in areas where the editorial board is composed of your peers. What’s more, these platforms have much greater resources to develop new ways of consuming raw content and much higher reach to make it worthwhile. Once integrated into mobile (which is already happening, albeit slowly), the relevance and utility of a local newspaper will slip even further. Of note is the fact that national newspapers actually increased online traffic over the course of the study cited in the article. Areas such as international news and government access are ones that it will be difficult/impossible for bloggers and citizen journalist to replace, and the larger papers will continue to grow their value based on that. What brings this back to marketing, however, is that the decline in readership on- and offline is far outpacing local marketers adjusting their media plans, leaving a gap that no new platform is completely prepared to fill.

Wired Magazine’s Jargon Watch picked up on our very own Online Analysts as an upcoming term, which is fitting as many of them are, in fact, trend setters. While Social Network Fatigue can be a problem in the position, it’s nothing that Slow Travel can’t fix, especially when it’s to meet an Ecosexual. I have now used all of the Jargon Watch terms in a sentence, which is oddly fulfilling.

We’ve released a new buzz report on product placement that was picked by The Hollywood Reporter. The main focus was on differing perceptions of product placement by platform. The report:

43 sites were researched with a focus on the top Film/Entertainment, Television, Gaming and Major Portal communities. Going back 3 months, 862 discussions directly related to consumer opinions about product placement were uncovered.

Surprisingly, 595 discussions reflected either acceptance or indifference to product placement, the remaining 267 discussions represented negative views. The majority of discussions centered on the use of product placement in film and television with only a small percentage of gamers discussing the topic. Overall, gamers were the most negative in tone to in-game product placement where the tactic is on the rise because they’ve had less time to become accustomed to the practice. However, the largest volume of negative discussion was focused on TV, which oddly enough is the one platform that consumers can get for free. The numbers breakdown as follows:

Online consumers appear to be savvy when it comes to product placement and are willing to accept it if it does not detract from the entertainment experience. Employing subtlety and humor are more effective than blatantly plastering products everywhere.

Sites sampled included:

TV – (TV.com, TWOP)

http://forums.tv.com (TV.com)

www.televisionwithoutpity.com

Gaming – (Gamespot, TeamXbox)

www.gamespot.com

www.teamxbox.com

Film/Entertainment – (IGN, IMDb)

www.ign.com

www.imdb.com

Mainstream – (Google Groups, Delphi Forums)

http://groups.google.com

www.delphiforums.com

Been a while since the last post, but wanted to provide a little more detail on a report we pulled together that was picked up by USA Today : Gamers: Wii has PS3 beat

Here’s how we pulled together the report- we monitored over 100,000 conversations on our top 100 gaming sites, and we found just over 10,000 that were relevant to the launch. The way we broke it down was to categorize the conversations as positive, neutral, or negative, which is determined by our analysts who specialize in gaming. The breakdown:

PS3:

• 7062 conversations
• 1945 Positive (27%)
• 2650 Negative (38%)
• 2467 Neutral (35%)

Wii:

• 3520 conversations
• 1711 Positive (49%)
• 638 Negative (18%)
• 1171 Neutral (33%)

A couple of things stand out to me- first, the difference in volume between the two consoles is almost 2-to-1, and might be indicative of the fact that negative threads, as a whole, generate more volume, or if the larger PS2 installed base lent itself to a larger fanboy population (probably both). Another thing that stood out is that almost all of the excerpted quotes in our report and in other media involve Wal*Mart as the setting for every story- maybe people had a hard time finding them because they all went to the same place. -Sam Huxley

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.

…36 hours. In fact, due to a computer glitch yesterday in acessing the blog, this might actually no longer be news. According to the New York Times, the study, which was done by a physicist at the University of Notre Dame, the time frame was actually much longer than they initiatially thought (2-4 hours).  The study also provided an interesting looking into the readership habits of news - that users read in “bursts” vs. continually. I’d like to see a similiar study done again that also factors in:

- The use of RSS: Does it change readership? I know that at one point, individuals I’ve talked to (myself included) would continuously check their RSS feeds and then after a few weeks/months of use, they’d begin a process similiar to the ‘burst’ process.

-  Mobile technology & its effect on the news cycle. My geuss is that the more mobiel we get, the shorter lifespan a news story will have.