ONLINE-ADS>> Advertising on local city services

LawMatt_at_aol.com
Thu, 13 Mar 1997 16:06:39 -0500 (EST)

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I have been reading this letter for the last few months and have seen no real
discussion of the local/;regional services that are springing up such as
Yahoo, CityView, Sidewalk and Digital City.

I am the Advertising Sales Manager for Digital City Dallas - Fort Worth and I
came to this job from the web side of things (for those of you who don't know
- Digital City is a business unit of AOL). The reason I took it is because I
believe strongly that a big part of the future of the web/online advertising
business is local.

While there are certainly national models that work for online commerce
(Amazon, Virtual Vineyards, etc.) most business is done locally. Local
services provide a way for businesses to drive customers to their websites
and to their stores. It also provides users with something that is regional
in flavor and, if done well, provides changing daily content to constantly
encourage usage.

While its exciting to travel the world on the web, most people still want
information about their community, if not, USA TODAY would have the largest
circulation of any newspaper.

Anyway, I would love to hear some discussion about these topics:

1. Does the local web/online model seem to be a viable one for commerce?
2. What are the perceived advantages/disadvantages?
3. Does the potential for local promotional tie-ins (such as on-site remote
chats, live events for users, contests that drive store traffic, etc.) make
local services potentially more effective for most advertisers?
4. Perception of Digital City versus other regional services (and please no
carping about AOL's modem problems - for one thing those problems have been
addressed and are rapidly subsiding and secondly, I was on three local ISPs
before taking this job and experienced as many, or more, connection problems
with those as I ever have with AOL).
5. Has anyone heard of any media planning models that look at buying local
services along the lines of a television network/spot buy? In other words
using large megasites for the "national" campaign and then filling in with
local services in those markets where additional weight is required?

There are many exciting things going on with the "locals" and I would be very
interested to hear your comments about them.

-Larry Matthews
Advertising Sales Manager
Digital City Dallas - Fort Worth
lawmatt_at_aol.com
(214) 954-6213

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