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.

Virtual worlds: The next Facebook? - CNN.com is an interesting article about the predicted boom of the “metaverse”, 3D interactive worlds where users interact via avatar. While I understand the attraction of immersion and rich experience, I think many of these studies overlook a key point- to truly represent a physical world there needs to be some perceived separation of the user from information. I.E., for me to believe that I’m on an island, the palm tree needs to be certain distance from me, the cabana another, and the sponsored kiosk yet another, and the time I spend getting from Point A to Point B helps reinforce the perception. When I’m online now, I have the convenience of accessing a multitude of information and sources immediately from my homepage, facebook page, search results, etc., and that’s a key advantage that I’d be sacrificing in 3D. Also, it is much easier (and faster) to scan text than other media- I would be hugely annoyed if the Washington Post or BoingBoing were only available via video or podcast, and the same is true with over 90% of the content I read everyday.

Much more intriguing, however, is the theoretical inverse of the metaverse, the geoweb. As dorky as it sounds, the ability to bring online in to “meatspace” will be much more valuable, IMHO, than bringing the inconvenience of the physical world online for most non-social, recreational uses. Being able to access limitless information wherever I am about a certain place, and read messages from other people about where to go, historical info, and which of my friends are nearby is very compelling, and has been hyped at this point much less. It also has the potential to be much more powerful for marketers in the next 3-5 years (think retail promotions, travel info, mobile advertising) than the metaverse will be in 10. I got through that whole post without mentioning the recent Second Life bank run! Whoops…

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.

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.

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.