Facebook yesterday updated its Place Tips feature and is passing out free beacons to SMBs. There are many implications that have already been unpacked across the blogosphere. But one under-recognized angle is how this fills a longstanding gap in offline attribution:…
What are the search marketing tactics that drive real traffic and conversions? It's an important question as more user engagement is happening on smartphones. Campaign tactics and calls to action need to align with shifting mobile search volume (and intent). The…
What is deep linking and why is it critical to the future of the mobile app economy? What's up with Pinterest and Instagram's new "buy" buttons? And what's the economic forecast for the on-demand economy? These are a few topics…
How big is the market housekeeping startups such as HomeJoy, Handy and Thumbtack? Is the business big enough to justify Amazon Home Services' leap into the market? We'll answer that question the last week before BIA/Kelsey NOW, coming up on…
What's the $55 billion elephant in the room? That would be the gross spend on co-op advertising annually in the US. For those unfamiliar, co-op dollars are typically funds earmarked by national brands for "market development" -- local advertising or…
YP has been growing in leaps and bounds since its 2012 launch. The company, formed by the consolidation of the former AT&T Interactive and Advertising Solutions groups by private equity firm Cerberus Capital, unveiled its new corporate signage installation atop…
Google has been launching lots of products to carry its search dominance into a mobile world. Given that 4 out of 5 mobile minutes happen in-app, this sidesteps the very place where its dominance has been established: the browser. We…
BIA/Kelsey is partnering again with the Local Media Association to produce this year's LMA Native Advertising Interactive Summit next July 15-16 in Washington, DC where we'll share our latest native ad forecast, insights about marketplace dynamics and trend lines of…
The Local On-Demand Economy (LODE) will be all about transactions. The ease of transaction between buyer and seller will need to match the lowered-barriers and "immediacy" of the on-demand service and experience itself. Otherwise, LODE's promise won't be fulfilled. It's…
Button, the New York-based developer of mobile deep-linking integration tools for use in local on-demand services, announced the launch of Uber integration into third-party applications. Foursquare used the tools to add a button to its location-based social sharing application to…
Retail SMBs are more poised than their counterparts in other verticals to adopt sophisticated digital advertising and marketing. This is clearly shown by BIA/Kelsey's Local Commerce Monitor (Wave 18) survey of small businesses. Retail SMBs are already highly oriented to…
How big can the Local On-Demand Economy get? We'll be examining this question in several blog posts this week as we prepare for BIA/Kelsey NOW, which happens June 12th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Use the…
What's the state of the art in local ad attribution? Are "shopper" publications dead? And what does Mary Meeker have to say about the on-demand economy? These are a few topics we tackled over the last week, aggregated into the…
Ad attribution is one of the most challenging analytic problems in marketing today. Who saw which ads, and what purchases resulted? It's a sticky challenge, especially in an increasingly multi-screen world. As a result, many advertisers use simplified models for…
Flexibility and other attributes of on-demand work are tailor made for millennials. This was affirmed today by Mary Meeker's annual "data dump" at the Code Conference. We argued a similar point in our report on the local on-demand economy (LODE):…
Though localized mobile marketing has been a topic with a certain degree of sex appeal over the past few years, most of it is decidedly unsexy. There's lots of nuts & bolts tactics for things like multi-location landing page strategies…
This post is the latest in a weekly series of excerpts from BIA/Kelsey's recent report on the Local On-Demand Economy (LODE). The series will lead up to BIA/Kelsey NOW, a conference on LODE that will take place June 12 in…
Is there life left in local, broadsheet "shopper" publications that highlight home and trade businesses and things for sale? Not according to OpenGate, a $3 Billion LBO firm that abruptly laid off workers for Pennysaver USA, the industry's largest company,…
If you follow BIA/Kelsey's Local Commerce Monitor, you know that email consistently ranks high for SMB marketing. This spans across business verticals, size, and other firmographics. But there's still a gap: most SMBs' email marketing tactics are fairly basic. They…
How is Facebook reinforcing its position in local? What are the business opportunities still left to come in the Local on-Demand Economy (LODE)? And what were the best things we saw at ad:tech? These are a few topics we tackled…