Yahoo has added more geographically relevant suggestions to its Search Assist drop-down:
The thing is, everyone has something comparable:
With the new, expanded Google-AOL deal, we now have four of the five big search engines (sans Ask) aligned in two camps: Google-AOL vs. Yahoo-Bing, with AOL and Yahoo the proxies of the bigger companies behind them.
The video below is now making the rounds. It presents Google CEO Eric Schmidt as an evil ice cream vendor who “already knows your favorite flavors,” presumably from your search history and related data mining.
The video advocates a “do not track” list but uses Google as the focal point for that broader message. It’s obviously over the top. But the images and message will likely resonate with people who are concerned about tracking.
This presentation of Google as sinister plays into fears that the company “knows too much.” In fact Google has been more progressive about privacy and ad targeting than most of its peers.
My view is that Google needs to be concerned about things like this getting out and shaping impressions of the company in the public mind. Previously the debate about cookies, tracking and targeting was arcane and inaccessible to most people. This makes it much more “accessible,” though in a manipulative way.
Do you think exposure to critiques like this, framed as entertainment, will affect larger public attitudes toward Google?
LivingSocial is now offering neighborhood level deals. Like Groupon personalization, this move represents an evolution of the model toward greater consumer relevance. Obviously hyper-local inventory is key for neighborhood level deals to work.
The first markets are Washington DC and New York:
In D.C., residents and visitors can explore localized offers from businesses in The District, Montgomery County and Northern Virginia. In New York City, discounts on restaurants, spas, boutiques, bakeries and more will be available for customers in Uptown, Midtown, Downtown and Brooklyn.
LivingSocial users that currently receive Deals in the New York and Washington D.C. areas will be alerted to the new options and offered the choice to pick which deals they would like to receive in their metro area, which could be one or all of the various Daily Deals.
The company has a presence in 64 markets in three countries.
Barry Schwartz at SEL explains the details of a new (to the US) program in which Google is featuring sponsored company logos on Google Maps. This is persistent and not contingent on search queries (vs Google local ads).
Note the HSBC logo below:
The program is CPM based and not tied to AdWords. The presentation is pretty unobtrusive. Consumers with brand loyalty will welcome this for obvious reasons.
It will also be available on Google Maps for Android and the iPhone. (Eventually I believe Apple will replace Google Maps with its own solution; we’ll see.)
Yahoo a long time ago had a similar program that displayed selected advertiser/brand locations on the map. Mapquest offers this today as well (though on a limited basis):
The challenge of local store inventory is one that companies have been attacking for some time with variable success. Consumers value the information, although it’s not a “must-have” and there’s lots of complexity in bringing it online.
There are a number of companies in the market right now trying different approaches:
… And of course Google.
The company announced several months ago that it was going to bring local inventory data to mobile and online. Rather than working with third parties, as it did the first time around in 2004-2005 (StepUp, ShopLocal) Google is going direct to retailers. (Roughly 15% of US retailers have “buy online, pick up in store” capability.)
Google in its inimitable, Googly way is asking retailers to provide inventory feeds directly to the company:
Since we announced the Local Shopping inventory beta some months ago, we have received great user feedback on the feature, and retailers have been clamoring to take part. Today, we’re making public our help documentation for participation. Please take a moment to review those documents, and if you’re interested, fill out the local shopping interest form. While we won’t be able to accept all retailers who apply, we will keep your name on file if we can’t take you at this time. Please note that excellent Product Search data quality is a prerequisite for participation, so make sure that you are submitting an accurate and complete data feed, including unique product identifiers. Additionally, to take part you’ll need to have your stores listed on Google Places, so make sure you have submitted and verified your store listings.
Google doesn’t need to get perfect data or “critical mass” at this time because these data will be presented as a “nice to have” feature in the context of a broader local/shopping proposition.
Milo, for its part, has been working hard on trying to figure out how to get independent and small retailer data into its system. It involves lots of heavy lifting. Shopatron has figured out a system that works for small retailers but the data aren’t provided to consumers in real-time. NearbyNow has a system that could work for “mom & pops” but the company has mostly avoided that segment.
Google will get large and some moderate-sized retailers to submit their data. And just like its AdWords experience with SMBs, it will have real difficulty attracting independent local retailers.
But Google’s visibility and the availability of this program generally may help accelarate the movement toward more real-time inventory data among more retailers, who in the aggregate don’t see it as a huge priority right now. They do want to drive people into physical stores, but they see myriad ways to do that. Inventory isn’t the only one.
I got an email yesterday from someone who told a very different story of the widely celebrated Gap-Groupon deal. The coverage of that event was overwhelmingly positive, including a piece in AdAge that quoted Groupon president Rob Solomon saying that the company’s phones had been “ringing off the hook” since the promotion:
Since last week’s national Gap promotion, Groupon’s phones have been ringing off the hook, said Rob Solomon, president-chief operating officer of Groupon. He expects the company’s next national retail promotion will happen “pretty soon,” with more to come during the fourth quarter.
In that same article there are details about how the Gap will benefit from in-store customers making up for the discount and so on. And I basically supported that idea in the abstract. But here’s a paraphrase of the “off the record” email I received:
A pretty good source said the Gap CEO was livid at the Groupon deal. He said it was so bad from a profitability standpoint that it will negatively impact their earnings per share.
Let’s be very cautious about taking this and running with it. I haven’t sought to verify any of this with the Gap or with Groupon (I haven’t had time). But if any of it is true it represents the exact opposite outcome of the story being told in the mainstream coverage.
On a related note, I was moderating a local-mobile discussion at the Omma Mobile Insider event last Friday. Also at the conference were some brands and agencies. I heard them express ambivalence about coupons, as bad for the brand, for margins and for creating undesirable consumer expectations. They also said they didn’t want mobile advertising or marketing to simply be about coupons or deals.
There are now many contrarian stories about daily deals and local merchants starting to emerge. I wrote an early one in The Dark Side of Groupon Sites. More recently I’ve seen the following and others:
One could argue — and Groupon President Rob Solomon previously did to me — that these stories reflect early glitches and the novelty of the daily deal phenomenon. In time these kinds of things won’t happen because merchant education will be better; people will know what to expect and be better prepared.
Stepping back, there are two things going on here: the press coverage (seeking a fresh angle) is trying to find the cracks or problems with this otherwise very successful model. But there is also some merchant ambivalence that is becoming clearer. I had previously believed that coupons and deals represented the perfect alignment of consumer and advertiser interests. I knew as a general matter that’s not always true. But these stories illustrate it in a more concrete way.
Groupon, LivingSocial and other deal sites will persist and continue to be enormously successful with consumers. But I’m now clear that they won’t ultimately cannibalize other forms of SMB marketing. That’s partly because daily deals cannot substitute for many other types of marketing. But it’s also because merchants won’t want to rely on deals or couponing exclusively — no matter how attractive the “customers not clicks” business model.
Do you agree or disagree?
Both DexOne and Local.com have extended agreements with Yahoo. The Dex-Yahoo agreement broadens the reach of Dex advertiser distribution on Yahoo Local:
All businesses advertising on Dex One’s popular local search site, DexKnows will now be able to have their online listings appear in Yahoo! Local search results. The expanded partnership doubles the geographic area covered by an existing relationship formed in 2007, providing more local businesses with greater opportunities to attract ready-to-buy customers…
The previous agreement between Dex One and Yahoo! exclusively covered the 14-state region where Dex One is the official print directory publisher for Qwest. Since the initiation of the original agreement, the relationship between Dex One and Yahoo! has proven highly successful, yielding thousands of leads for local businesses and laying the groundwork for the current expansion.
The Local.com-Yahoo agreement appears to be an extension or legally updated continuation of a pre-existing relationship in which Local.com uses Yahoo paid ads to monetize pages. Local.com shows ads from a variety of other sources as well. According to an SEC form 8K filing:
The Agreement provides for the distribution of Yahoo! Inc.’s paid search results by Registrant [Local.com] for which the Registrant is compensated a certain percentage of the adjusted gross revenue (as defined in the Agreement) derived by Yahoo! from such paid search results. The effective date of the Agreement is August 25, 2010 and it ends on July 31, 2011, but will automatically renew unless either party provides prior notice of its intention to terminate the Agreement.
The interesting thing about the Local.com-Yahoo arrangement is that Yahoo won’t have its own paid-search results anymore; they’ll be Microsoft adCenter advertisers. So Yahoo’s publisher network effectively becomes Microsoft’s network as the transition proceeds. It may be that the Yahoo-Bing/Microsoft transition going on now prompted a renegotiation or new terms.
Turning back to the Dex-Yahoo deal: it provides some nice additional exposure for Dex advertisers. However Yahoo Local is not what it once was. The Yahoo brand is still very strong and lots of people use Yahoo search to find local information (in fact it was second only to Google in terms of audience reach in a survey just completed). But the traffic to Yahoo Local is diminished from the time, a few years ago, when it was the innovator and traffic leader in the local category
Yahoo is planning a big local content push, which is part of a broader local/geotargeted advertising initiative. It will be interesting to see whether and how search and local business listings (from partners like Dex) play in that forthcoming network of local sites.
As has been reported, Yahoo is going to launch a collection of local news/content sites. Yahoo will leverage its $100 million Associated Content acquisition and may combine that with professional and traditional-media partner news content.
It goes up against AOL’s Patch, MSN Local to a lesser degree and a range of traditional media companies trying to build out local content networks. As Alan Mutter points out in an excellent piece, suddenly the online world is overpopulated with local and hyper-local blogs and sites.
Where once (hyper) local was thought to be the answer or competitive edge for traditional publishers and newspapers, now everybody’s doing it. Though not quite a “commodity” there’s now so much local information and news out there you can’t begin to track or consume it all. Mutter points to a listing of “more than 250 local sites” in the SF Bay Area alone. There are a lot of hyper-local posts falling in the forest; is anyone reading them?
Mutter’s larger point — and I totally agree — is that the easy availability of local news content will doom or contribute to the failure of online newspaper paywall strategies. He argues that instead of paywalls (at least online) publishers should focus on new products:
Instead of putting cycles into exercises like charging for access to obituaries, publishers need to focus their marketing power, content-creating resources and ad-selling capabilities on developing unique print, web and mobile products that will be valued by consumers and advertisers alike.
For anyone other than publishers of mission-critical business or government news like the Wall Street Journal and possibly the New York Times, pay walls will not fly. It is time for everyone else to move on to more productive pursuits.
Unfortunately falling revenues means that newspapers have cut editors and writers. If I were a publisher, however, I’d focus on quality and re-building the brand (you trust us, we have credibility). That doesn’t preclude content partnerships but don’t rely on content farms for much.
I’d also very much focus, as USAToday is now, on a cross-platform strategy that is mobile-centric. You also have to work on pricing and be smart and maybe creative about it: do you make mobile/iPad apps free with the print subscription? Are print and digital separate products? Is an iPad version a premium product?
Then there’s the user-experience component; it absolutely must be state of the art. Content alone won’t carry the day.
But I’ll say it again, in this noisy, noisy online world — with more noise to come on the local front — brand becomes critical. Everyone is competing for the long tail in search results, it’s time to drive some direct traffic with brand equity.
Yelp is now rolling out daily deals in San Francisco (its second market after San Diego). Other markets will come “online” in the near future:
Here’s my earlier post about Yelp daily deals: Yelp Says Let’s Make a Deal.
Related: travel/outdoor activities and local deals (& more) site Zozi receives $3 million in funding.
The “it” here is online marketing or the larger understanding of consumer behavior that argues in favor of online marketing. I was reviewing some focus group reports this morning and I was amazed by some of the “verbatims” that expressed skepticism about whether online marketing “works.”
These focus groups were convened to investigate SMB needs and marketing interests. In the materials I saw there were many expressions of doubt and skepticism about online — though they weren’t universal. There were varying degrees of sophistication on display and some nuance in terms of the SMB attitudes. For example, email was more well regarded and more trusted than search marketing by some.
The idea, however, that at this point in time SMBs are questioning whether online marketing works or whether it’s relevant to their businesses is kind of absurd. Several comments in the focus group materials sought “case studies” and other “evidence” that search marketing and other online methods “worked.”
Serendipitously I had occasion to speak with ValPak’s Jim Buckley this morning and mentioned some of these attitudes in passing. He echoed them based on ValPak’s experience with some of its SMB advertiser-customers.
I understand that online marketing is terribly complex and frustrating for most SMBs. But some of the comments I saw could have been made in 1999.
This core skepticism about online and SEM in particular is partly at the root of the churn numbers that have been so well publicized and discussed.
Do others see this same level of skepticism about SEM in particular or online in general from SMB customer-clients?
Greg Sterling is the founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence (SMI), a consulting and research firm focused on the Internet's influence on offline consumer purchase behavior.
