The Great Transfer of Wealth: The Transformation of Local Advertising
Bravo to Gordon Borrell, President of Borrell Associates, for moderating a session with a minimum of PowerPoint slides (a notable lack thereof, in fact) and a maximum of real information and discussion.
What are we talking about when we focus on local advertising? How about this: $120 billion will be spent this year by local advertisers in local media—with interactive media claiming about a 9% share, increasing to about 13% next year.
A billion here, a billion there ... pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
But Peter Hutto, VP of Business Development and Sales for local.com, points out that while that’s a sexy number, the landscape is a lot more complex than all that. You have national brands who want to reach out locally, regional businesses that want to blanket a geographic area, and very local mom and pop advertisers.
After each of the panelists—Eric Stein, director of local markets for Google; Kurt Weinsheimer, general manager of ocal marketing services for Spot Runner; David L. Smith, CEO of Mediasmith; and Peter Hutto—gave a few minutes of pitch, Gordon made the sobering point that in the local marketplace, the local agencies and companies are gonna kick the asses of the guys on the panel. David disagreed, noting that the local guys know traditional but don’t really know online. Eric pointed out the Google is partnering with the locals, with mixed results.
Maybe the most interesting point in the session was contradictory to the session’s title as Gordon argued that “the great transfer of wealth ain’t gonna occur, it’s going to stay in the hands of the Hearsts and the Cox’s” as they focus on their online properties and learn the medium. He went on to add that no media has ever gone away as the result of new media coming in—they simply transformed ... and that’s what’s happening today.
The Local space is most definitely heating up. As web services and technologies mature and go mainstream (blogging, video, etc.), so will the local vertical.
Thanks to the Ad Tech crew for putting together a wonderful panel. It’s great to see more people talking local!
For those of you who missed it, check out Part One of this 55 minute panel here:
http://www.wellcomemat.com/video/EDDB2678A9
By Phil Thomas Di Giulio on 2008 11 07
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