Paper G: PlaceLocal
So ReachLocal is now a public company for a whopping week now and I spent the last few hours last night reading through their prospectus. I had met them very briefly at an AdTech conference and had always been meaning to have a deeper look… I had always mentally put them in the same bucket as Local.com but it turns out they’re pretty different. While Local.comprimarily runs consumer destination local search sites, ReachLocal on the other hand is providing a service to local business owners, helping them dip a toe into digital marketing, first with search and now with an offering that includes display advertising.
I’ve grown to the believe that there is a huge opportunity in the area that ReachLocal is targeting… there is so much advertising money floating around in the local markets and until recently so little attention being paid to servicing brick and mortar retail folks who just have a few thousand dollars a month to spend on digital advertising.
While Google is now up to something like 1.5 million advertisers, and has done a great job of servicing the long tail of online oriented advertisers. It’s the long tail of offline advertisers, which is proving to be a bit tricky to convert to online, not just because they’re the long tail and there are tens of millions of them, but they don’t live and die by traffic to their website… heck many don’t even have websites and can be pretty ambivalent toward the whole thing!
One of the newest companies to pop up on my radar screen in this area is a company called Paper G recently started by some Yale and Harvard students. Paper G is focused on the digital display advertising space and one of their products PlaceLocal is trying to solvea familiar problem for this market which is how you make it super easy for folks with very little time, digital resources and digital wherewithal to develop and run digital display ad creative.
The PlaceLocal product greatly simplifies the process of making an online display ad. I gaveit a trial with a popular burger joint, Five Napkin Burger, that opened a new location on the Upper West Side a few months ago. Essentially all I had to do was type the name of the business and the city andPlace Local did most of the rest. After typing in “Five Napkin Burger” and “New York” PlaceLocal first found the business (ok so it was really the old location in Hells Kitchen, but I give them credit there anyway) and one click later it was busy scraping the web or hitting various APIs to find stuff to put into the ad. While I waited a minute or two for it to do its thing, I must admit that I was pretty skeptical that it could be this easy and still be good, but I must say the result was pretty damn impressive.
After more than a few minutes of whirling ‘working’ icons… woo hoo it had found a bunch of content to use in the ad! At this point you get to pick some VERY basic components to put in your ad like the logo, the design style and click through URL and PlaceLocal populates the rest with a slick flash movie full of restaurant images, menu images, and snippets from reviews from popular restaurant review sites like Yelp.
There were a few hiccups with my trial run with Five Napkin Burger… PlaceLocal couldn’t come up with a logo so I had to crop the company name out of another image, but it was super easy to do with the tools provided by PlaceLocal. And while at first pass most of the reviews selected were stellar there is one looping through that disses the endive leaves on their burger, and another Yelp snippet which simply says “a perfect side for this perfect burger” with no reference to what that side may be. Fortunately they have great tool so you can easily get back in there and see the whole review and then edit what appears in the snippet in the ad. In fact their tool for messing around with the assets that go into the ad were pretty good… you can add various photos and change things like business category and hours etc… and the whole thing is vey well designed to make it powerful enough to change many of the things you wanted to change without introducing too much complexity to the process.
Once the ad is created you can buy into three simplified buckets of media buying with spends ranging from $300 to $1,000 at what works out to about a $15 CPM.
I am not sure how much traction they’ll get as a stand alone place to create and run local advertising but as a tool for easily creating local oriented ads the product does very, very well. So it’s not surprising to see local newspapers and folks like Time Out New York flocking to check out their service as a valuable tool for their sales force selling their own owned and operated sites. Over time too many of the similar format of intertwined user reviews and photography in a flash movie may begin to get old, but I suspect that they can develop some new templates to keep the ad creative options fresh and flexible.
It shouldn’t take long before folks like CitySearch, ReachLocal and others take notice and try to rip it off or partner with these guys.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by PaperG, Ben Allen. Ben Allen said: Paper G: PlaceLocal: So ReachLocal is now a public company for a whopping week now and I spent the last few hours … http://bit.ly/bLCKta [...]
[...] It's a week later, and as of this writing, the company's stock price remains steady at around $15 (get quote) – $2 above the offering price, but $2 below the way-back-when offer price of $17-19. Location Awhere's Ben Allen notes the IPO as well as new players in the space with differentiated products like PaperG, which may be a fit for ReachLocal, Citysearch and others. Read it. [...]