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.

Advertising Age - CMO Strategy - Rethink Your Web Strategy or Fail is a great article addressing many of the oft-overlooked realities of online marketing. And while I strongly agree with 90% of what Nilofer Merchant has to say, I do differ on a couple of her “Best” and “Worst” examples (none of which, thankfully, are clients). Craigslist, a questionable inclusion to begin with (not really being a marketer, and a proud holder of “.org”), has revolutionized local advertising by being simple and easy to use- the “all text” interface that it is criticized for has not dissuaded millions of users from embracing it. True, it is in no way elegant, but the for-users-by-users feel is one of its strongest brand assets, and has let it succeed where many cleaner, slicker and flashier commercial properties have failed.

However, my larger issue with the top 3/bottom 3 is the attempt to draw an apples-to-apples comparison between widely varying categories and types of sites. What the “Best” share in common is that they are all services/ecommerce sites or apparel manufacturers (and in the case of Threadless, both). Threadless and Amazonall have enormous inventories, and having customers rate, share, and organize the selection based on personal interest is the only viable option, and one where they can take a relatively “product neutral” stance. I.E. “I don’t care if you buy a Sony or a Canon camera, as long as you buy it from me and come back”. Nike, Converse (owned by Nike), and Lego all reside in a space where customization is key to their category, have a short manufacturing cycle, and have enough sway that they can sell direct to the consumer. The Panasonic and Nikon “Worst” sites, on the other hand, represent an entirely different category. Customization from an appearance standpoint, in electronics is much farther down the list of consumer considerations than apparel, and the products themselves are have a much longer, more involved manufacturing cycle. Also, because they are created by manufacturers that are not in market leader positions (like Nike) their ability to own the consumer without ticking off retail partners is limited. Threadless, by seamlessly (pun intended) incorporating community content, digg integration, and strong social network tools is definitely a model to look to, but one has to keep grounded in product, manufacturing, and most importantly, consumer realities.

Wired has a great article on how the open nature of Google Maps is changing how we interact with our surroundings. What really struck me as interesting is the potential of KML, which allows users to mash-up maps with any data they want and openly share it. Notably, Google is indexing all of the KML files they can find, whether or not it is specific to their own product. So what does this mean for marketers? Google Maps (and for that matter Live Local from Microsoft) will be integrated more and more into mobile, as evidenced by the iPhone’s deep integration of the service, and “third screen” marketing will become a much more effective and necessary part of the media arsenal. Will I drive an extra mile off the highway to go to a well reviewed local diner, versus a fast food chain at a rest stop? Definitely. Would I plan a vacation itinerary around other user reviews that I find via an online map, versus brochures I pick up, or a paid travel site listing? Absolutely. The talk about online local advertising is mostly focused on the online extensions of local media, not the local extensions of global portals, but I think that this will shift in the near-to-mid term. And again, what will drive the expansion, plus make local search (and by proxy, mobile search) much more effective is user tagging. Instead of a product page, it’s a businesses sticky on a map, and letting your users know how you want to be described (not that they’ll always listen) is a large part of taking advantage of this new platform. Whether I’m a car dealership that is betting that my location and advertising will carry the day, a casual dining restaurant chain that wants a new, better way to connect with my customers, or even a global CPG that wants to communicate with a customer base that is on a cell versus a laptop, the geoweb is worth exploring.

Digg’s popularity is not news, in fact, many mainstream news sites, like the Washington Post have embraced social news services for some time, based on the fact that a story on the front page of digg can drive tens of thousands of extra visitors in a 24 hour period. What I find fascinating, however, is that marketers have failed, AFAIK, to incorporate social news services on their own sites. The investment to incorporate such functionality on a product page is minimal, and the return can be significant. It also has SEO benefits, and can create a long term presence within social networks for accurate product information. Unlike news organizations, which have to maintain objectivity, companies are also free to suggest tags to shoppers who want to share their finds with others, and while screening out negative tags is impossible, the vast majority of shoppers who have come to a page will follow a recommendation versus creating their own. As we see more and more search engines begin to incorporate user tagging into their rankings, it is likely that experience integrating services such as digg now will potentially give a significant edge to marketers in the not-so-distant future.

Great article over on ZDNet about the  cost of “Social Freeloaders” - the majority of Social Network/Social Bookmarketing/Web 2.0 users who are contributing to a site, but are watching/reading/listening to others contributions.

Netscape launched a beta version of the newly revamped site, an easily identifiable copy of Digg - but with more channels and a group of 8 “anchors” who will both monitor and create content. This comes right on the heels of Digg moving into new content channels as well.  I agree with Digg CEO that they should be “proud” of the Digg clones - the interesting thing happening with the beta right now (if you check it out) is that it seems Digg users are “fighting back” on the beta site by posting anti-Netscape news stories about Digg. Kudos to Netscape for leaving that type of content up vs. trying to cover up or control it - attempts to control or delete it would probably just instigate the community further. It’s also nice to see that there is the (somwhat) rational debate going on vs. random Netscape/Digg bashing.