According to AdAge, Federated Department Stores is poised to drastically change their Marketing Media Mix in the coming years.  In a move that reminded me of major beer brand Foster’s recent media eviction – Federated will move as much as $425 million away from local print media.  At first glance, I read the newsclips to say that they were pulling out of local newspaper completely.  Much like what I think about Fosters’ move - my opinion is that putting all of your eggs in one marketing basket is a mistake; however, according to the article:

The most dire prediction calls for as much as $425 million of the retailer’s ROP newspaper advertising to disappear by 2008. More conservative estimates, such as the Deutsche Bank research report “Federated Impact May Be Greater Than Papers Expect,” by Paul Ginocchio, forecast a still-stinging $200 million blow for the already ailing medium. Federated’s annual newspaper spending currently totals $830 million.

The headlines I saw everywhere today sensationalized the potential loss in revenue for local newspapers.  Many stories alluding to the end of the Newspaper industry are like the headlines we read in the supermarket check out line.  But really, Federated is just having a go at promoting a national brand, with national media tools.  That changes the equation for local newspapers and will certainly equate to lost revenues.  On the up side – local online newspaper sites continue to grow at a strong pace and although articles tout TV advertising and national magazines as the NEW vehicles for Federated, few are talking about the role of online.   According to the article:

“Federated’s bevy of historic and beloved department-store brands will be officially reborn as Macy’s, backed by the company’s first national branding campaign.” 

“Our media selection will be driven by where our customers’ eyeballs are going,” said Jim Sluzewski, Federated Spokesman.

“Newspapers will continue to be a very important medium,” he said. “The fall launch is one point in time, and what happens longer term is something we are still going to be working on,” added Federated Spokesman Jim Sluzewski.

In my opinion, Federated is completing a loop that began when they started acquiring regional brands like Burdines and Foley’s.  Having started my career with the online advertising teams for two prominent newspaper groups,  I had the chance to pitch one of the major Federated brands back in 2000.  At the time, Burdines was one of the original department store brands in Florida.  Just 6 years ago, Burdines still actually needed a transactional web site to (as they put it) “help drive additional foot-traffic in to their stores”.  In addition, they were just starting to look for media outlets for online recruitment advertising.

Today In just 6 short years times have changed, Burdines is gone, consolidated under Macy’s.  Federated has brought much to the table as far as online recruitment goes and is often touted as having one of the best online careers sites on the web @ Retailology.com. 

In Federated’s opinion, consolidating under the Macy’s brand was really the logical next step in consumer minds. It follows that Macy’s as a national brand will now be promoted nationally. For now, the hype, and reality is that local advertising will suffer in the short term but Federated isn’t shy about adjusting a marketing strategy that isn’t working out.  Abby Clark VP of Sales for The Columbus Dispatch made the following point in AdAge:

…despite Macy’s national brand ambitions, newspapers remain relevant. “It’s going to be risky. People go to newspapers and look for sales and shopping, and if they don’t, they may not think to go to Macy’s as often.” Ms. Clark said Macy’s experimented two years ago by pulling back on coupon offers in ROP ads. “They backed off quickly from that because it hurt them,” she said.

And who said national brands don’t benefit from local newspaper advertising?  Just ask Best Buy, Target, Home Depot, Office Depot … the list goes on.  As a local consumer, where you are is where it’s at, so local consumption of products and services goes hand-in-hand with consumption of like-focused media and tools.  Federated, THE single largest print advertiser, has been advertising in local newspapers forever.  I think that Federated’s move will do more to prove some of the value of local print advertising than crush it.  No doubt the print revenue that was enjoyed by local print publications will never be the same but the power of local comsumers will crop up in future Federated media buys… as they said, they will put their money – “where our customers’ eyeballs are going.”

I believe that Federated’s new Chief Marketing Officer, Anne MacDonald is just dealing with the reality of managing her marketing budget. You don’t often get carte blanche to take a $1 billion dollar ad budget and just double it (OK, that actually NEVER happens) – in the real world, you rob from Peter to pay Paul.  MacDonald, a former Citibank marketer is no doubt a national brand expert (and believer) so the national focus is no shock.  And don’t forget that Citibank and Anne MacDonald’s peers have won most of their accolades in the last 5-10 years for their progressive work in online advertising, an area where local media outlets could surely make back some of their losses.

technorati tags: local advertising online advertising newspapers

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This post was originally published as part of Recruiting.com’s blogswap on Tuesday August 1, 2006 on Stlrecruiting.com, the recruiting blog of Jim Durbin of Durbin Media.

Want a low cost, out-of-the box way to reach passive job seekers within a 30-mile radius of your company headquarters? How does this sourcing list strike you?

• The Travel Channel
• The Golf Channel
• Lifetime Network
• Sci-Fi
• HGTV
• MTV

Which channels do you think your ideal candidates watch on TV at night? Now that Spot Runner has streamlined the purchase of local cable TV advertising and made the buy-in attractively low (think $500 not $5,000 or $50,000) maybe it’s time you found out.

Since its beta release earlier this year (read our EXCELER8ion post on Spot Runner beta here) Spot Runner has often been referred to as the adwords of TV advertising. Like Uncle Google (no blood relation), Spot Runner aims to make it easy for businesses to create, plan and execute an affordable media buy all from the comfort of their keyboard, albeit on cable TV instead of a search engine. TV advertising has never been a serious option for small local businesses (Spot Runner’s initial customer target base) because the production costs and pricing were either too complicated, out of financial reach, or both. Sound familiar? I could have just described the relationship between recruitment marketing and Television. In fact, if you replace much of what has been written about Spot Runner and replace ‘local’ or ‘small business’ with ‘recruitment’ you begin to see the opportunity.

“People think about mass market, but with local TV you can target practically the neighborhood level,” said Spot Runner co-founder David Waxman. According to the article TV ads on the cheap for small biz published on CNN Money.

Hmmm, reach people with specific interests in a targeted geographic location with the proven emotional impact of Television. You know, passive job seekers do watch TV! Why Television you ask? Here’s a quote from co-founder Nick Grouf that sums it up pretty well.

socalTECH: Why the TV space — when it seems like everyone seems to be moving toward the Internet for local search?

Nick Grouf: “Television is the most powerful advertising medium in the world. The average American spends half of their leisure time watching TV – twice as much time as listening to the radio and almost four times as much as reading the newspaper. Television also has the ability to capture people’s attention more strongly than any other advertising vehicle. TV has an aura of importance that enhances an advertiser’s image and prestige. By offering a dynamic message that incorporates sight and sound, motion and emotion, TV advertising has the ability to generate trust and excitement better than any other medium.”

I contacted Spot Runner and asked them about their views on recruitment marketing and they connected the dots with local Television advertising pretty easily.

“TV advertising is a proven, effective way for companies to brand themselves, and using it to attract new talent is an innovative application of the medium. With Spot Runner’s self-serve platform, companies can go to spotrunner.com and choose – from thousands of templates – an ad that reflects their brand, and customize it with a voiceover that fits their recruiting message. Then, they can easily create a media plan targeted towards their core employee demographic. If an organization with multiple campuses is looking to hire just in the Phoenix area, for example, they can utilize Spot Runner to launch a smart, cost-effective campaign in Phoenix. With just a couple clicks of the mouse, the ad can be up in just two-to-four weeks. Spot Runner’s intuitive website makes it possible for a marketer with no intimate knowledge of the local Phoenix media market to launch a smart TV advertising campaign,” said Keith Wiley, Spot Runner Corporate Communications.

Spot Runner just inked a deal with mega ad agency JWT. The combination is largely aimed at giving JWT’s national advertisers a tool to let franchisees and local dealers leverage their own national brand at a local level with appropriate customization and targeting. Just as national advertisers can leverage Spot Runner’s platform for national advertisers, so too can recruitment marketers. Perhaps Spot Runner will work with JWT’s recruiting arm in the future?

In the mean time, don’t forget the example of Arm and Hammer’s Baking Soda product. It was released in 1846 but it wasn’t until 1972 that people began using it to keep their food fresh in their refrigerator. Products have more than one use. Even though Arm and Hammer introduced multi-use interactive spinning wheels to illustrate the number of uses for baking soda it wasn’t until the refrigerator use that Arm and Hammer baking soda sales really took off. It’s no irony that the famous surge in their baking powder sales were directly linked to single-use TV spots featuring the fridge example – leveraging the mass-market penetration that TV is certainly most famous for.

Products and tools get used by people in highly creative ways when they see an application for one of their business or personal problems, even if they have to do some translating or work-arounds to bring it all together. Necessity, the mother of invention. While, there’s no greater challenge in business today than finding great talent I believe recruitment marketers and HR teams alike could benefit from stepping outside their comfort zone when it comes to finding the best people. Is it a lack of imagination? Have we been lulled into one-dimensional thinking by recruiting focused sales pitches telling us how special and unique our little world is? When did we loose our ability to put 2+2 together for ourselves? Well, I don’t think we all have but it’s amazingly easy to take the safe and well-traveled route isn’t it?

If we mimic the example offered by Spot Runner and JWT it’s not hard to see how you could leverage your national or employer branding and hopefully, some existing TV creative to build your own recruitment TV spots. Voila, you can finally leverage the power of Television to build your recruitment brand or even with more of a direct response angle for a major hiring spree. Or, go with an independent film vibe and have employees interview each other about why they love working at your company and pick the best ones to air in your commercials. Make a contest out of it like companies are doing with consumer generated advertising content on the web. Oh, and while you’re at it, use the finished product in your web advertising and employee orientation package. It’s all out there – even the home run.

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Gannett, the Tribune Company and Knight Ridder each own one-third of the job board CareerBuilder. So, when McClatchy bought Knight Ridder – the big lingering question was “what will happen with KR’s share”? The contract between the original newspaper entities had a provision stating that if any of the owners were sold, the others could buy the remaining equity. Gannett and Tribune said they wanted to buy back Knight Ridder’s third – McClatchy said – not without a nice payout:

Gary B. Pruitt, the chief executive of McClatchy, said his preference would be to maintain a stake in CareerBuilder, but if not, he said he expected a “big check.”

“We’ll either be a partner or we’ll have a lot of money from the proceeds to pay down our debt” from the Knight Ridder deal, he said. “We’re in discussions and it’s unresolved, but there are other options.”

The negotiations are over and today the new Careerbuilder arrangement was announced and McClatchy will retain a 15% stake, pick up full use of the CB platform for 12 of their properties that were outside of the CB fold prior to their acquisition of Knight Ridder, and cash in on Knight Ridder’s foresight in driving the original Careerbuilder acquisition by KR and Tribune to the tune of $310 million. Just think, that’s only a little more than three times what Tiger Woods makes in a year ($97MM).

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So I created a MySpace page – you can see it here. Go create a page and come be my friend, I only have 2 – Tom and Dave Matthews Band. Tom on the other hand has 87,609,208 friends and DMB has 105,924, and my step-son and little sister are *too cool* to be my friend – bastards.

So what does this have to do with recruiting? Well, I’m no pretender, and I don’t like to spout off my opinions on issues that I don’t really have a deep understanding of. So, after the discussion that ensued from my recent post frowning upon making hiring decisions based on the content of a MySpace page – it seemed really wrong to explore the issue any further without going “inside”.

In case you’re interested, I’ve chronicled my registration and some pearls from the process:

1. You go through the typical un/pass set up, but they also ask you for a naked picture right off the bat. Actually, I almost stopped my registration as soon as I saw this and worried that my experience might not live up to all the hype, “Photos may not contain nudity, violent, or offensive material or copyrighted images.” No Copyrighted images??? I’m a blogger – come on.
2. You then begin building your profile. They start out asking you about your reasons for using MySpace – your choices are as follows:
1. Dating
2. Serious Relationships
3. Friends
4. Connecting with prospective employers
5. Networking
3. Step three… here is where we have set people up to fail in using MySpace as a window into a prospective candidate. Step three asks for your interests. I will let this picture that captures the COMPLETE list of *interests* that you are asked for when setting up your profile speak for itself:

That about sums up what you hear about MySpace – Swingers; Alternative Lifestyles; Drunks and Druggies. Seriously folks – it isn’t fair to use this for hiring decisions – but that is just my two cents. As I brought up in the previous discussion – this is not called MyResume. It was never created to be a place where you advertised your “Candidate Brand.” Candidates should have rights too and not have recruiters digging for dirt so that companies can seemingly reduce their “risks” and protect themselves from making “bad hires”. Your job as a candidate is to prove that you have the ability to do the job that an employer needs and that is done through your work history and your accomplishments.

Regardless – if you are brave and can get over all the hype – online social networking and sites like MySpace, Facebook, Tagged, Bebo, Bolt, and Friendster can absolutely bolster your online recruitment strategy – check out John Sullivan’s article from ERE.net, Outside-the-Box Recruiting — Using MySpace.com as a Recruiting Tool, here.

Stay tuned for part 2 of my MySpace recruitment marketing adventures. I will begin building my network and let you know what I find. Warning – if you are in the recruitosphere and you have a MySpace page – you better clean it up because I am coming to make you my friend.

PS – I am still so happy apparently I am NOT too old for this – the site’s registered members fall into the core demographic of 16-to-34-year-olds. YES up to age 34…have I mentioned that 30 was a hard birthday for me?

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As most of our readers know – Julian and I are Knight Ridder Digital Alumni. We chronicled our thoughts about the KR sale back in January here. Julian said of the pending sale:

It really pains me to see our old company, Knight Ridder Digital, up for sale (Shannon and I are both KRD alumni, and it’s actually where we met). Everyone knows that current Knight Ridder shareholders are looking for bigger profits and valuation from the looming sale. They’ll get some of that but only if they recognize what they really have and invest in it. I’ve been surprised that none of the press has talked about other companies that could stand to benefit from buying Knight Ridder other than the (yawn) other newspaper companies and private equity firms (cringe) that have been named as likely suitors. I know there are good arguments as to why other companies aren’t being discussed, especially interactive companies like Yahoo! or Google, but I think that’s all wrong. Yes, print is going down hill – no kidding – but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t value in the product, it is great local content after all, and even though the Google’s and Yahoo!’s of the world are more about dismantling old models like the one KR operates under it doesn’t have to be that way.

While Julian is particularly passionate about ‘local’ – for me – it has always been recruitment. I was the SE Regional Manager of the Careers Channel at KRD (KR.com at that time) during the KR/Trib acquisition (Gannett joined later after initially turning the deal down) of CareerBuilder.com. Back in January, we pondered what would happen to the CB piece of the KR sale – secretly (or not so secretly since we blogged about it) hoped that maybe Yahoo would make a play for that piece of the business:

Knight Ridder’s online recruitment revenue’s are about 40% of their total online revenue and it only keeps growing. If Yahoo!, currently third in the online recruitment space to CareerBuilder’s second, purchased Knight Ridder they would become a Monster.com squashing powerhouse. Yeah, Tribune and Gannett, the other owners of CareerBuilder would have to agree to the sale but I think they could find it in their hearts to get in bed with Yahoo!, especially if Yahoo! extended some of their other offerings to them. I don’t think it hurts that the CEO of HotJobs, Dan Finnigan, used to run Knight Ridder Digital and was a chief architect of the CareerBuilder acquisition. After working for Dan at both Knight Ridder Digital and before that, SBC’s SMARTpages.com I saw first hand what a great biz dev talent he is and I can’t believe Dan’s not thinking about these things and talking them over with Terry Semel, CEO of Yahoo!.

But alas, no Google, no Yahoo!, no interactive anything – it looks like the other 2 current owners (Tribune & Gannett) want all the pie for themselves to thwart the inevitable decline of their core product. Today from The New York Times:

Portions of job recruitment Web site CareerBuilder.com are up for grabs, The New York Times reported in its Thursday editions.

Gannett Co. (GCI), the Tribune Co. (TRB), and Knight Ridder Inc. (KRI) each own one-third of CareerBuilder. Their contractual arrangement provides that if any of the owners sold their stake, the others could buy that owner’s equity.

Earlier this year, when Knight Ridder was sold to McClatchy (MNI), Gannett and Tribune said they wanted to buy back Knight Ridder’s stake in CareerBuilder. Knight Ridder is to be sold officially to McClatchy next week. When that happens, Gannett and Tribune have the right to buy what will become McClatchy Co.’s (MNI) one-third, at market value, the Times reported.

Tribune Co. has indicated that it wants to own more than its current one-third of CareerBuilder, but the Times reported beyond that, it is unclear how the pie might be divided.

So what will ‘McRidder’ be worth to McClatchy after they sell their most valuable asset? And for that matter what about McRidder’s value after selling some of those lauded KR properties like The Mercury News and Philadelphia Inquirer? It sure makes the new combined company a lot less attractive if you ask me.

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I was reading one of the recent posts over at Organic’s blog Threeminds and really like GMC’s latest effort to promote their new Yukon.

It’s a non-branded, branding play. The coffee cup sleeve promotes a unique url that in turn showcases GMC’s new Yukon. What a nice format (in your hand) and method this could be for promoting your employer brand.

Convince the local Starbucks to let your company use their sleeve for your non-branded recruitment branding effort? Not so easy? Yeah. I’m sure they’ve turned down thousands of these offers in the past nationally (perhaps not so many locally). Add some muscle to your offer. Take the charity angle and do the world a good turn (helps with those Starbucks people in Seattle) and offer to use the sleeve to co-promote a charity of theirs. Now a url linking to your employer brand is associated with charitable work and Starbucks. Done for a few stores around your target market (like that College that you’re targeting with your recruiting efforts) you might just pull it off.

OK, on the easier to pull off scale (since I’m SO delusional) how about contacting the organizer for the next major job fair you’ll be at and agreeing to subsidize the cost of X amount of coffee & refreshments for the career fair participants in exchange for the coffee cup sleeve sponsorship? Your organizer saves on coffee cup sleeve costs and coffee costs. This idea has got legs, I mean lids. Yo, it’s off the sleeve!

Or, if it’s that college target you’re really after go find the locally grown Starbucks alternative coffee house where the kool kidz hang (do these even exist anymore or are they all Starbucks?). The local shop will be more than happy to have a new revenue stream. Wow, I really want some coffee now.

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I was reading Jon Fine’s recent article, Putting The Screws To Google – How Old Media could take back its share of search’s ad bounty, on BusinessWeek.com. While I don’t think Jon’s idea is entirely feasible in this disruptive world of online business, it did get me thinking about examples of where traditional old-line business models, like the content providers that Jon suggests could topple Google, and more disruptive web models, like open source software, have found success on the web. There are even examples where business models on the web have successfully morphed from one model into another to stay relevant.

The best example of this in my mind is iTunes. Everyone from the seven year old kid next door to your church pastor was downloading music for free when Napster was in its heyday. Then the noose was tightened by the RIAA such that today, free music downloads have once again become the province of the pirates. Arrrrrrr! In other words it is niche – although Microsoft wouldn’t categorize it this way. 

Once the supply was crippled by the RIAA’s legal prowess, Apple capitalized on it with a distribution vehicle (iPods) paired with a decent service, iTunes (it’s not that great) with a clear value proposition. The moral?  If done right, Jon’s idea to screw Google could work – but I agree with him that there’s no way the old media companies have the fortitude or vision to do it.  Quite the opposite of Jon’s idea for an ‘Old Media gang-up’ to topple Google, I recently suggested that companies like Google or Yahoo! should purchase an old media company.

These new-line companies have what the old media companies lack and it’s the very reason that we don’t really believe there’s any chance of Google being toppled.  But, there is hope for making a boat-load of money by controlling all that good local content out there.  In the end it would seem that the disruptive model almost always wins on the web but that may just be a sign of its immaturity.

I was reading a blog post from my father that discussed how people are using both the ‘command and control’ model as well as the ‘disruptive’ model with blogs. He highlights an analogy that is apropos here from Eric Raymond’s, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Mr. Raymond, among other things, has written a book that is available online about how these models play out in the world of software development. Dad describes Raymond’s analogy thusly:

“To grossly simplify, the cathedral style is that used by hierarchically organized companies like Microsoft or IBM. The bazaar style is used by open software development projects like Linux. The former uses tightly held propriety code developed by a well supervised team with assigned roles. It is the tried and true method of engineering that has been used to successfully build battleships, bridges, software, and, well, cathedrals for a long time. The latter style, in apparent defiance of common sense, openly posts source code on the Internet where any interested party can change it any way they want, scrutinize it for bugs, and post suggested fixes. The amazing outcome is that Linux has become serious competition for Microsoft even though its developers are all unpaid volunteers.”

There you have it, the quintessential power clash of the West Egg vs. the East Egg, old money vs. new money, old thinking vs. new thinking. The winners will certainly be the ones that manage to innovate while not throwing out the baby with the bath water. After all, Cathedrals are most certainly beautiful and the world would definitely be a sad affair without the bizarre.

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What do you get when the people who started PeoplePC and FireFly Network get together for round three?

Spot Runner, a new Internet based Ad Agency. Spot Runner is attempting to bring broadcast television commercials to the masses of local advertisers for as little as $500. That’s right, $500 and that will include production, planning and air time for five Benjamins.

You probably recognize the name, PeoplePC, but may not recognize FireFly right away (at least I didn’t). FireFly was the company that made FireFly Passport, which Microsoft purchased and renamed Microsoft Passport. Yeah, we all recognize that one. PeoplePC is the company they sold to Earthlink.

Whenever two entrepreneurs like Nick Grouf and David Waxman, who have managed to strike gold twice before get together, you should take notice. But that’s not what caught my attention at first, it was their new product Spot Runner and the implications it could have for local advertisers of all kinds (including mom and pops, recruitment advertisers and many more small to medium sized businesses that want a T.V. presence on a craigslist budget).

Why am I writing about T.V. advertising on a blog about Interactive advertising? Because online video, or Internet T.V. ads, are really making a big splash right now for all the right reasons (they work great for both brand and direct response advertisers) and local advertisers of all kinds need help with broadcast production at affordable prices. Spot Runner is demonstrating just how easy and inexpensive that could become and I expect to see this model with an online focus very soon. In fact, I’m shocked that Spot Runner isn’t launching with this option, especially since BusinessWeek journalist, Justin Hibbard mentioned that Spot Runner was ‘building a platform for managing online and off-line advertising campaigns.’ on his August, 2005 post.

Common guys – why are you holding out on us? Actually, I’m sure similar services already exist for inexpensive online video production but I doubt they have the Video-Ads-for-Dummies like feel of Spot Runner.

The growth of online video is having a dramatic impact on local T.V. station revenues as I outlined in my previous post on the topic. Although Spot Runner isn’t going after online video production just yet, you can bet it won’t be long before they do so.

Where does this fit in and how will it work?

Back when the Internet first took off in the mid-90’s, the local advertising space was right at the top of the list of nuts that major advertising publishers wanted to crack because local represented then, as it does now, the largest, and most profitable sector of advertising.

While local Telco Yellow Pages, local newspapers and now Google and Yahoo! slug it out in local search there remains a huge void for local advertisers who will be eager to utilize ’sexy’ broadcast creative and distribution in their online media mix. I know these advertisers intimately. I’ve called on thousands of them in my career while selling for the Yellow Pages and online newspaper companies I’ve worked at for the last seventeen years (Knight Ridder Digital, SMARTpages.com, Pacific Bell Yellow Pages and GTE Yellow Pages).

I’ve sold against T.V. successfully for a long time and their Achilles’ heel was always production and air time costs. Spot Runner plans to change that by leveraging their proprietary technology to ‘templatize’ T.V. ad production. Spot Runner allows businesses to log on, provide information about their business and desired locations, and select a commercial from a library of thousands of pre-produced ads. The ads are personalized with the business’s specific information and logos.

We did this at Pacific Bell’s SMARTpages.com (originally launched as Pacific Bell @Hand) back in the 90’s as a way to bring super efficient ad creation and low costs to mom and pop Yellow Pages advertisers who were enticed by web advertising but lacked a web site or the knowledge and tools to create an online ad. The technology matched company industries with appropriate clip-art and created a banner ad on the fly with the advertisers ad copy. In this way a local florist could have their first Internet ad for under the Telemarketer magic dollar threshold of $19.99 a month.

Stuff like this makes me to want to start a locally specialized ad agency that creates, bundles and manages all this cool local advertising like local search, pay-per-call, local video, behavioral targeting, geographically targeted e-mail…er, don’t get me started!

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Until 2005, local T.V. web site revenues were akin to the character Tom Hanks plays in the movie Castaway where he tries in vain to start a fire. That is to say initially unfruitful. But just as Hanks’ character masters creating fire by rubbing sticks together and promptly builds a bonfire, local T.V. revenues and content are following suit and everyone from local advertisers to recruitment marketers stand to benefit.

Content was weak initially (unless you count weather radar) because T.V. stations didn’t have good technology to broadcast all their content and users didn’t have the bandwidth or PC speeds to make viewing video very practical.

While local T.V. has a long way to go to catch up to other local online revenue share leaders like newspapers, their recent doubling of revenue in 2005 (now $283MM) and predicted growth of 39% in 2006 is worth taking note of. Local T.V. now accounts for 6% of total local online ad spending, as compared with newspapers that command a 43.2% share.

But that’s not the point – we have our eye on the opportunity here, and not the past.

You’re reading about the growth in local T.V. station revenues because online video is blowing up this year – as are other online enabled video distribution vehicles like video iPods. Consumer desire for video content has been there all along but is just now being satiated by the aforementioned critical mass of broadband connections and fast PC’s.

In the online rich media advertising category, which includes ads like expandable banners and the floating flash ads that dance across your web browser, online video ads represent the fastest growing rich media advertising format. Online video ads have already proven themselves to be the most effective brand building ads you can purchase online. They’re no slouches at driving traffic via click-thrus either. Online video combines the richness and emotional hooks of broadcast commercials with the targeting, delivery control and measurement that has made the web such an effective advertising tool.

For recruitment advertising, online video might finally open up all the benefits of broadcast video to lure passive candidates to employer’s doors.

Visualize this (oh, too bad I don’t have a video plugin on our blog *yet* because this would be so much better in video).

A programmer is working late at the office and checking their favorite coder site for clues on fixing their programming bug that has had them stymied for the last 12 hours. They’re tired, they’d like to go hop on their Vespa, drive home and kick back for some quality time with Current.

What would you rather have represent your employer brand for this programmer?

A text link on their favorite coder site that reads ‘Tired of late nights at the office?’ or a video ad on the same site that starts out with a voice over saying the same thing while extolling the virtues of company X’s work/life balance while panning through the company gym, on-site child care and showing an employee riding their Vespa home while it’s still light outside?

So, next up we just pay for video production and we’re in business and we don’t have to shell out $50,000 for a small T.V. ad campaign that we can’t target with anything more accurate than a blunderbuss.

Still want the ad to run on real T.V. and not the web? There’s a new solution for that as well that’s been enabled by the Internet. Look for our next post on EXCELER8ion featuring Spot Runner. update: the post is now online here.

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President Bush attended a fund raiser on Palm Beach this evening. I work about three miles from Palm Beach International, and of course Air Force One landed just as I left work. So while I was waiting for the motorcade to pass and let me continue home – I had some time to sit and listen to “All Thing’s Considered” on NPR.

On this edition, Robert Siegel interviewed Mike Pegg (listen here) about his Google Maps Mania blog and the Google Maps mashup craze. I immediately got to thinking about how targeted and local Google Maps are and, how they would translate brilliantly for recruitment marketing. How? Visual job searches. Of course as soon as I looked into it I realized my idea was hardly unique – Mike’s blog already lists the sites that are using mashups for Recruitment – http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/#jobs

For the Job Seeker – Visual Search
With this idea – job boards could offer visual search results. Instead of the usual overwhelming assortment of jobs that are returned, a map where you could then choose to see jobs based on their location would appear. The sample below is from Glendor.com’s job search page.

For the Recruiter – Visual Resume Search
Take a look at how FreeRecruiting.com has used Google maps for recruiters – The Linux Job, Resume and Consulting Market . FreeRecruiting.com runs 25 job boards, and they are all enabled with Google Maps. You can do a traditional text search to see all the relevant resumes. As candidates update their data in the database, you will be able to see the candidate posted on this map. FreeRecruiting.com claims that this is the world’s first map of Linux Professionals. Only the Linux board has data today, but their other job boards will be displaying data shortly.

This is the tip of the iceberg with how we can use mashups for recruitment marketing. Take a look at all the mashups for different categories that Mike has on his blog. Some of the best examples for how to apply this in a local marketing strategy can be found within Real Estate – take a look at this mashup – http://nosyneighbormap.com/. Other industries have already added images, additional information, and even video to their mashups.

In one of our recent post we spoke about the web’s power to bring authenticity to employer brands. I can see mashups’ use being expanded for employer branding, such that, a job seeker can find your open position on a map, click on its pin point, and have images of people currently working there – maybe some testimonials about why they work at the company or in that department, or for that manager, etc. Google could easily integrate this into Google Base right now.

The interview also featured some really fun things that people have created by hacking and placing overlays on Google Maps. When you are done here – check out some of the best one’s they discussed (BeerMapping.com; Dig to the other side of the Earth; Real-time locations of all running suburban trains in Dublin, Ireland.)

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