The promise of “local”

Local is the new hottie and everyone wants to date her! The promise of local (in terms of content and targeted advertising) has long been the promise land for all of us emerging media types.  With the growth of broadband and IP related content solutions, the dream of targeting relevant content/ad messaging can become a reality. Semantic solutions are allowing us to learn about users and IP-based data allows us to push down that marketing funnel and deliver the dream of relevant messages.  Cable has been playing with DMA and SubDMA targeting for the last few years but has yet to really land the plane.  For the larger cable and satellite solutions it’s a numbers game.  They need access and affectability in more regions and households to make this a true play and they aren’t there yet.

Mediabrands, the Lab‘s holding company,  has just launched a new Hyper-local Media and Marketing Unit to offer new local marketing solutions.   “Geomentum,” is a new business entity, whose  hyper-local vision is based on a bottom-up investment strategy, which begins with sales data, and data reflecting the changing media mix. 

This “local data” will whittle down to the most granular point possible (currently household, but at some point, individual and all associated addresses and personas) and allow for very relevant media buying and planning decisions.

Meanwhile, YouTube, as part of Google’s larger strategy to be the hottest fashion icon,  has just launched its “News for you” video service. Located under the news section on YouTube’s channel page, News for you allows you to view local news videos which are served up to you based on your location (you can change this to represent other locations).  YouTube is claiming that this will help create revenue for other location TV stations and partners by providing sources of revenue but as the New York Times and other news industry insiders state, newspapers aren’t making any money from YouTube right now and this might again create more opportunities for “citizen journalists” to have more access to spreading their content which will remove attention and eyeballs from the professionals.