Placecast Teleconference Tomorrow: Mobile Technology and Retail
Placecast is holding another free webinar tomorrow titled Innovations in Retail: Using Mobile Technology to Drive Foot Traffic and Sales. I listened in on their earlier teleconference in May of this year and found it quite valuable. The conference is looking to bring together agencies and retailers to talk about some of the initiatives they have taken on in this space, what options are available, and why brand marketers should explore location based advertising. The panel includes a mix of folks including marketing agency Barkley, consumer products company The North Face, Primary Impact Research and of course Placecast itself.
The teleconference is free and open to the public and the panel will take live questions from listeners, but you must register first so leave a little extra time. It’s scheduled for 12:30 EST/9:30 PST so certainly worthwhile to listen in for a bit as you sit at your desk and enjoy lunch in New York or breakfast in the Bay Area.
Google and AdMob: Mobile Location Ad Network Coming?
Ok by now everyone has heard the news that Google plunked down $750 million to buy Admob. It’s no secret that Google has big plans in mobile advertising, and AdMob was a leading player in the space so it shouldn’t have been all that surprising.
Tech Crunch had one of the best summaries of why it makes sense and the nice fit between the two companies… the article is definitely worth a read. My two cent summary from that article and others on the deal: Read more
Placecast Teleconference Post Mortem
I had a listen to the Placecast Location Based Advertising teleconference last week and Placecast has made the audio available on MP3 from their site, so you can now download it to hear the whole panel discussion… it’s worth downloading and listening to the next time you have an hour to kill while on the treadmill or on the ride home from work.
All the panelists were great and included the CEOs of NearbyNow and Placecast as well as agency and research firm representation. It was a good general backgrounder on the state of things in location based advertising and a couple of the comments by Derek Leedy from Mediasmith resonated in particular with regard to what was unique about the ability to use “location” as a criteria for delivering advertising. Derek made some observation about how the location element adds an important new element to what marketers can infer, based on ones physical surroundings, and how it allows advertisers to reach customers when they’re potentially more action oriented and in a different consideration mode than when they’re on the web… emphasizing the benefits of the real time nature and the added relevance it brings.
It reminded me in many ways of how online search advertising is different than online display advertsing… with search being more action oriented and a generally different frame of mind… and we all know how that worked out.
Scott Dunlop of NearbyNow also had some telling stats to quantify some of the lift they’ve seen from better location relevance and I was generally surprised to hear of some of the success they were seeing. The last time I used NearbyNow I found myself time afer time back at an e-commerce web site rather than a real nearby store… I decided to give NearbyNow another run, but I’ll save that for another post.
A Look at Placecast
Do you ever find yourself thinking that you have a pretty good grasp on what a company does, only to one day dig into some real details about their business, and realize that you really had no clue, or that significant money wasn’t made in the way you always thought it was. I am sure everyone has their own example but for me the ones that have jumped out over the years include Blockbuster bringing in up to 19% of its revenue from late fees in some quarters, or how little money movie theatres actually make from selling movie tickets and how little money auto dealers actually make from selling a new car, or gas stations from selling gas.
Well, to be honest I was never sure exactly what 1020 Placecast did although I figured it probably had something to do with targeting mobile ads by geographic location, sort of the mobile equivalent of what I recall Digital Envoy doing for the web world back in the day. While it seems that Digital Envoy has been bought out and diversified their offerings these days, I will always remember them as the guys that many of the major ad servers would use behind the scenes to do the heavy lifting to sniff the IP address of the user and then determine where that user was coming from in order to allow websites to target these users by geography like Los Angeles, or zip code 10021 or Georgia. It came in handy when folks like a regional bank or a theme park that drew most of its clients from a 300 mile radius wanted to advertise online yet only target their geographically relevant prospects.
Well after some more digging on 1020 Placecast and a few conversations with folks more knowledgeable than myself on the subject, I once again discovered that while I may have been a little right, I was mostly wrong and missing most of what they were really about.
First of all, while the company bills itself as a multi platform company including mobile, web and e-mail… web is still the major focus here not mobile, for the simple reason that there is already today a ton of money being invested in web advertising campaigns. So generally what we’re talking about here is good old fashioned banners, buttons and skyscrapers… aka display ads.
Second of all we’re not talking about some behind the scenes nameless and faceless technology that just does its thing anonymously without a thought like Digital Envoy… Placecast is seeking to establish itself as the brand that advertisers and publishers think of when they want to exploit the benefits of localizing their ad messages. You can check out some great examples of their technology at work from the cases on their website.
There are two core components to the 1020 Placecast offering. The first part is a technology which streamlines the otherwise laborious process of customizing each ad creative to its local market. So for example let’s say you’re in Columbus, Ohio looking for cars on autotrader.com. Rather than just seeing a generic Toyota banner ad, maybe you get an ad with some Ohio State logos and Jim Tressel’s mug, along with a Prius in a sweater vest directing you to the closest dealership a few miles away and with a local phone number. Meanwhile, the same ad served to a user surfing autotrader.com in Gainesville, Florida would have a Gator logo and Coach Meyers’ mug directing you to a similarly convenient Toyota dealership in that market.
The benefit of course is that the “localized” ad is more relevant both in to whom it is delivered to AND in what it says. As a result consumers are more likely to respond which is great for the advertiser and means that the publisher may be able to charge more for the inventory too.
The second part of the offering is that Placecast has created a network of 20 publishers where these types of ads are more likely to fit in… ie in localized content where the user location can be easily obtained. So they have partnered with publishers like Trulia and Eventful where the content and intent of the user is locally oriented to begin with… giving advertisers a one stop shop for both the ad serving tools and the network on which to use them. I don’t get the feeling that the getting of the location data involves anything special, it just seems to be provided in any number of standard ways.
While the network has been built from the ground up to be focused on location, in theory there is no reason much of this couldn’t be used for any dynamic ad creative change with things like your age, gender or income being used to build the ad creative to make it more relevant.
Ad targeting like this obviously already occurs on the web quite extensively, and dynamic creative also exists to a lesser extent, although Placecast is unique in that they’ve systematized what has been done in various one-off instances and are focused on just one big targeting attribute which is location.
How this all pans out for Placecast is anyone guess… there is no doubt that the state of geo targeting on the web is less than ideal and Placecast provides an elegant solution for what is a problem for many advertisers. The question becomes a familiar one to many in the location industry… will this work as a stand alone entity or is it simply a feature of something bigger, something that belongs bundled in with a full service ad serving suite? I suspect that like Unicast, Pointroll, Eyeblaster and the other 3rd party rich media ad vendors out there, there really is no reason for them to exist as separate entities from larger ad servers and ad networks, yet they do… and they’re making a nice chunk of change along the way as they wait to get gobbled up and assimilated into something bigger.
Free Location Based Advertising Teleconference – Thursday May 7
I’ve been chatting with the folks at 1020 Placecast over the past couple of days, and they’ve alerted me to a teleconference they’ll be hosting next week that could be worth listening in on, particularly if you’re in the advertising industry and want to stay on top of some of the latest and greatest happening in the field. A panel including folks from 1020 Placecast, NearbyNow,
CatalystSF and Sterling Market Intelligence will be talking about location based media, current examples of its use and why and how advertisers may want to start using the technology to their advantage. The conference is free and open to the public by calling 1-712-429-0689 and using conference accesss code 610749.
Could be worth checking out… and if you think you’ll want to ask questions, be sure to have your Twitter account up and handy, as question for the event will be handled via Greg Sterling, via his Twitter, @gsterling.
Mobile Search Will Beat and Steal Lunch Money From Mobile Display Advertising
A great blog post over at Local Search News about the mobile local opportunity. Definitely worth the full read, but key take aways for me was the expected shift in ad dollars on mobile to move away from the largely display oriented stuff we see today toward an explosion of mobile search revenue. The Kelsey Group shows display revenue at over 60% of total 2008 mobile ad revenue, but sinking to just under 10% by 2013, mostly as the result of massive search growth from a mere $39 million to a whopping $2.27B or around 70% of all mobile ad spending in just five years.
I dug around to get the latest and greatest, and it looks like in the good old fashioned web world search is about 45% of ad revenue today with premium display close to a 1/3. So Kelsey’s predictions for the mobile world certainly seem to magnify the trend we’ve seen so far on the web with search having an even bigger role and display, a decidedly smaller role. To some degree this makes a lot of sense, since the small footprint of the mobile handset doesn’t leave a lot of room for all that lovely creative ad work, the sight sound and motion and all, and search is simple, quick and to the point which is well suited to the phone.
An even more interesting part, was not just the AMOUNT of search revenue, but the TYPE of searches expected… citing data from Google that mobile searches are 2-3x more often to be local in nature than searches done via a desktop, The Kelsey Group calls for over 1/3 of mobile searches to be “local” in nature in five years, and for over half of that whopping $2.27B in search revenue to be generated from “local” search queries.
Kinda makes you wonder what kind of local stuff all those folks will be searching for on their phones and who will be the benficiaries of that cool $1B+ in local oriented search ad spending. 
Retail-ization of Google Search Results
What’s the fuss about? Well before the recent change if you performed a Google search for a term like “dentist”, “florist” or “lawyer” you would normally get links to other WEBPAGES with content about “dentists”, “florists” and “lawyers’. So for example a search for the term lawyers would have links to the Wikipedia entry on lawyers and lawyers.com, and about 100 million other pages like it… in other words connecting the Google searcher to more and more INFORMATION about the subject of “lawyers”. But now with the change that seems to have been put in place, Google is trying to infer the intent of the searcher in some instance… assuming that maybe the user doesn’t want to find more INFORMATION about lawyers in the general sense, but instead wants to be able to locate a real nearby lawyer.
In case you’re wondering, Google evidently uses standard IP lookup to determine the location of the searchers computer in order to give the appropriate geographically relevant results… see above an example of the SERP from a search for the term ‘coffee’ from a PC in midtown Manhattan.
Enormous leap toward Google embracing location awareness as a core element of search? Or simply Google trying to further improve the search experience and giving people the results that they most often want?
KPMG On LBS Advertising
“The greatest marketing opportunity for mobile is location-based advertising, according to 48 percent of respondent to the KPMG survey.” – Feb 5, 2009 Survey
FTC on Behavioral Targeting Regulation and Location Data
I just read through (ok so I really just skimmed and searched) a couple of FTC documents, one regarding potential regulation of the online behavioral targeting industry issued yesterday and one about the mobile marketing industry, specifically a session related to Location Based Services from May 2008.
I am a little familiar with such things having worked for a leading cable network targeting kids and the various marketing to kids self regulation policies and the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act (aka COPPA).
Kudos to our government for 1. being proactive in addressing such things and 2. opting to take the wait and see self-regulation route first before imposing some heavy handed and unnecessarily restrictive policies that would stop innovation dead in its tracks.
A quick Control F (search) on the newly released FTC Self Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising reveals that the commenters to the commission recommend putting
“precise geographic location” data in a “sensitive” information category that “deserves some form of heightened protection” which would put it in the same category as “information about children and adolescents, medical information, financial information and account numbers, Social Security numbers, sexual orientation information, government-issued identifiers”
The location awareness issues here are somewhat familiar from the years of online behavioral targeting (transparency, consumer control, express consent, how long to hold data), but more complex for mobile location awareness which includes issues related to location accuracy, real time data vs delayed data, device owner versus user rights, and the more muddled stack of understanding who controls and sees what on a mobile device (carrier, device, platform, application, business operator?).
In one of my more ambitious days I registered awhere.org for the purposes of addressing some of these issues for not just advertising but general LBS development… but I fell asleep shortly after starting.
Navteq announces LocationPoint LBS Ad Platform
- a new channel for advertisers and the opportunity for them to reach consumers when they’re making shopping and purchase decisions.
- map to include “storefront” information directly in the map (rather than jumping out to the web on connected devices?)
- ability for advertisers to ‘target’ users in the geographic vicinity
- includes “rich” ads like click to search, click to call, click to navigate and click to coupon
Garmin seems to be one of the first to use the platform, and the release seems to imply that the ad revenue may be subsidizing the free traffic capabilities offered in those models.
All of which sounds pretty interesting if you ask me, but the devil will of course be in the details. Reading between the lines in the release it sounds like they’re trying to manage expectations, and that their corporate publisher/OEM customers should only expect the revenue to amount to a small subsidy, at first anyway.
I certainly believe that a specialized mobile location aware ad network could be huge in the future (see earlier posts on this blog), and it will be interesting to see if Navteq is able to pull it off, or if it would be a better fit for someone like advertising.com. Microsoft’s MSN Direct group has seemingly been working on something similar, so 2009 could be a year of big developments on the mobile LBS ad network front.
