Matt Booth, Senior VP and Program Director at [praized subtype=”small” pid=”66afa9c1b5e4cd2f613f200ec61d955d” type=”badge” dynamic=”true”] started the ILM ’08 conference in Santa Clara with some very interesting insights and thoughts around local advertising’s perceived ROI and the herding (bandwagon) effect. One thought was that the perceived ROI of print business directories is not very good vs. other types of local advertising like e-mail marketing and pay-per-click search advertising even though actual ROI is still very good.

This lead Matt to describe what he thinks will be the characteristics of winning ad products in the future:

1. Immediacy (no latency and full transparency), i.e. better perceived ROI
2. Lead tracking (easy and simple to understand).  Don’t expect advertisers to do it themselves.
3. Pulsed advertising (on/off by season).  Required flexibility.
4. “Conversation & reputation management” tool. Tools to capture/manage the dialogue between consumers and SMBs.
5. A blend of content and ads that work well together (almost advertorial)