I like to think that Local is the last frontier of interactive advertising. Apparently, so do the organizers of this week’s San Francisco AdTech show. The only “local” speakers were Martin Niesenholtz of The New York Times, who sees himself as more of a national figure; and a couple of reps from the pay-per-call industry.
Still, there was some local representation. YellowPages.com, SuperPages.com, Ingenio, Local.com and TrueLocal each had booths – each promoting their localization capabilities to national advertisers, and their interactive agencies. ShopLocal, Local Launch, Live Deal and Laredo Group were there too, among the 9,000 reported exhibit hall attendees.
Big talk at the conference centered on the big trends in online advertising right now: behavioral targeting, verticalization, search and video. Niesenholtz said that behavioral works “particularly well in The Times. It takes hard news inventory …and makes it relevant. Demographics only get you so far.” Niesenholtz added that he’s got the best of both worlds with The Times’ acquisition of About.com, which he boasted was “57,000 channels” of verticalization. “We bought the long tail.” But the strongest growth opportunities are probably reasserting themselves in branded advertising — especially now that online has been more widely accepted as part of the media mix. Search isn’t the path to go for launching Gillette’s new razor, he noted. You probably still start with TV.
In fact, it was refreshing to go to a conference where search was not front-and-center, but still seen as an important part of the equation as it converges with marketing. Image search, for instance, is becoming increasingly prevalent, and could lead to a new TV paradigm. But image search is “not as relevant as text” for paid search advertising, and adds to “feature creep,” said Kinetic Results’ Kevin Ryan. “It is getting hard to find things,” he complained.