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.

Funny or Die, a Will Ferrell-fronted comedy video site, has received plenty of coverage around its launch, more around his involvement and their intro clip, “The Landlord” than around the user-contributed content, which has been more tepid. That said, there is an onslaught of theme-based video-sharing launches, based around humor, non-profits, tech, etc., which brings up a familiar scenario- What if the audience that YouTube has aggregated fragments right as marketers finally figure it out? The struggles that agencies are going through trying to adapt creative to the online video platform will only be compounded when assets will have to be adapted to different formats, channels, tagging systems, and communities in addition to figuring out appropriate length. Clearly many of the start-ups around today will not be around to witness this additional shift, but as marketers focus on the “what?” in a message, they should also be anticipating a much more complicated answer to the “where?”. Oh, and the same thing is happening to social networks as well, but I’ll save that for another post.

Our CEO, Pete Snyder and Project Manager Kaitlyn Wilkins co-authored a great piece in iMedia Connection today. Dealing with the media’s questionable use of social networks after the Virginia Tech tragedy, it raises some very hard questions about appropriate use of people’s online information. A good read on a difficult topic, and hopefully it will cause people to think twice before making public personal profiles in the future.

Great article “Wonderful World of Wikis” over at Read/WriteWeb, which gives an overview of the many different flavors of social reference tools. One interesting point made at the end is that social networks are a type of Wiki, though limited in user input to an individual’s profile. I think that the announcement by WetPaint that they are adding social media tools to their product, showing the inverse to be true as well, points to a growing trend of Web 2.0 convergence. For social reference sites to be viable, they must have an active community that ensures the validity and value of the content. Conversely, for a social network to be a success, they must make it easy for members to provide worthwhile information to other members. Add to this equation the development of Wikia Search, and this convergence will potentially have a huge impact on marketers.

This, of course is entirely new ground for brands, as striking the balance between providing marketing speak and valuable, balanced information. What will most likely happen, however, is that brand information will be provided at a much quicker pace by consumers, both pro and con, than brands can adapt to participate in the conversation. Though the impact of an unflattering or inaccurate Wikipedia profile today is significant, it will pale in comparison to the damage that can be done as these types of sites proliferate and a potentially large share of the search market migrates to a user-indexed product. The challenge will be navigating a slew of protocols that are implemented to prevent abuse by those who would look to “game” the system. While the threat of such behavior is definitely real, companies can be an extremely valuable source of information to these communities once they look at these platforms as another way to talk with the consumer versus just marketing at them.

Interesting how video-sharing has transformed the face of romance- we did a quick snapshot of Valentine’s on YouTube, and here’s what we found:

Highlights
We found that people were utilizing video sharing extensively:

– Over 1200 Valentine videos were added on the 14th, the vast majority of which were video ecards of widely varying quality. Some were the standard slow song + hearts + scripted “I love you”, while more original directors took advantage of the snow to scrawl out their messages.

– 5 Marriage proposals were contributed, bringing the total to 254 on the site, ranging from CG animated productions to balloon fly-bys, to more awkward productions.

– Interesting twists on the traditional for single users – one user fished for Valentine suitors with a rendition of “As Time Goes By” that garnered almost 60,000 views, over 450 comments and 20 video responses, while another user volunteered to be any single persons sweetheart via a personal email message, which generated a whopping 609,366 views as of this writing and over 2500 users took her up on her offer.

– Viral marketing pieces for Nokia and Siemens (set in the future) under the premise of being wedding proposals did not fare as well as their organic brethren, generating just under 3600 views for Nokia (in 11 months) while things look a bit better for Siemens which was viewed just over 6500 times since it launched Valentine’s Day.

iMedia Connection: The Snickers Factor: When Buzz Turns Bad - Thanks to iMedia for giving us this opportunity, and we’ve received a lot of great feedback so far on the piece, which is due to the great work the team here at NMS did in pulling the report together. I also wanted to emphasize a couple things in the article to be clear.

First off, the main angle was about how Snicker’s media strategy made it easier for their critics to attack them, and how that could be avoided in the future by other marketers. Why the creative offended people and whether or not Masterfoods would have been better off addressing the issues involved instead of selling product and promoting the brand is well beyond the scope of the article.

Second, the “five years ago” statement might have been an underestimation- the best comparison I’ve heard to date is to the Miller Lite “Catfight” spot, and that aired in 2003. Though it might be more valuable to the hypothetical question as to what the reaction to the “Mechanics” spot would have been if it featured two women, I think the fact that Miller was able to overcome the controversy and actually expand the schedule of the spot in the face of similar criticism is a testament to the growing influence of the consumer.