Offering puts the intent in local ads

A new offering in the local space could give local businesses a bigger impact in the social space. From LocalResponse, the platform is called Intent Targeting and it basically takes the social updates from consumers and offers relevant targeting based on those updates.

by Kristina Knight

LocalResponse Testing Social Retargeting Tool

May 24 2012 Tim Peterson

Back in April you may have tweeted how much you hate doing taxes. Sometime later you may have been browsing the Web and noticed ads for TurboTax popping up. That probably wasn’t an accident.

That’s because TurboTax-maker Intuit was testing NY-based startup LocalResponse’s new Intent Targeted ad product, which uses publicly available social data to target mobile and desktop display ads.

“We found over a million people that tweeted the week before tax day ‘I hate doing taxes’ [or] ‘Taxes suck’…and when these people actually came to the Web, the desktop Web, we actually displayed to them a TurboTax banner ad,” said LocalResponse CEO Nihal Mehta. “This is revolutionary because literally we’ve done tons of research in the space and we don’t think there’s anybody else doing this.”
            Creepy? Yeah, a little. But LocalResponse limits itself to only publicly available content, so while most tweets are fair game, a Facebook status post is shielded, provided users’ privacy settings block just any random person from being able to see it.

Here’s how it works: LocalResponse combs through public social media content from the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and Foursquare and identifies a social ID, like a Twitter handle, connected to that content. The company then partners with third-party data providers to connect that social ID to a cookie that will identify the user the next time he or she visits a website logs in with his or her Twitter account.

At that point a cookie is dropped on the user’s browser, so that if he or she navigates to a site where a Twitter log in isn’t required, LocalResponse can recognized that person’s cookie within an advertising exchange—and then deliver an ad relevant to that user’s social media posts.

Mehta said LocalResponse is able to target up to 100 million unique users on a monthly basis through its partnerships with numerous data providers and online publishers. The company’s president and cofounder Kathy Leake added that LocalResponse expects to encounter zero privacy issues with this kind of targeting because it only uses publicly available social data such as tweets that can already surface from searching on Google or Bing.

LocalResponse says it can also employ natural language processing, which enables it infer things such as a person’s location. For example, a user could tweet “There’s a sale at Retailer X” with Twitter geo-location settings turned on, and LocalResponse could identify the words “at” and “Retailer X” and correlate that with the longitude and latitude of the tweet’s location to determine that the user was in Retailer X’s store when the given tweet was posted.

And if Retailer X is a LocalResponse customer, the brand could access the company’s self-serve dashboard and launch a display campaign targeted at that user. That’s about as precise as it gets, according to Leake.

“If you’re broadcasting intent—whether that’s sentiment or your location—that’s pretty much the strongest signal there is. It’s not lookalike targeting. It’s not traditional segmentation or behavioral targeting or contextual targeting. It’s actually intent that you yourself have declared,” asserted Leake.

25 Up-And-Coming Startup CEOs In New York

Alyson Shontell | Apr. 24, 2012

New York City is full of startups. But the real winners have amazing leadership teams driving them to succeed.

We polled tech industry executives and investors to find CEOs who are rising stars; they told us who their favorite early-stage startup CEOs are.

LocalResponse isn’t Mehta’s first rodeo. He’s founded Ipsh!, a mobile marketing startup that sold to Omnicom in 2005; he is an angel investor in startups like Neverware, AdMob, Tapad and Hashable.

LocalResponse is nearly profitable, and it helps advertisers target relevant people via social media in real time. So if someone tweets about a Slurpee, 7-11 can immediately follow up with a DM or Facebook timeline message.

It poached the co-founder of Media6Degrees and the one-year-old startup is already securing 6-figure ad campaigns. 

“The click-through rates we’re seeing are 46 percent, not .01 percent like typical banner ads,” Mehta told us last year. In its first month (May 2011), LocalResponse’s $1-5 CPC model generated $50,000 from Twitter ads alone.

How New York City’s busiest CEO strikes a balance

7TH APRIL 2012 by COURTNEY BOYD MYERS

In just 2 weeks, serial entrepreneur Nihal Mehta flew to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress and then to Cannes, France before flying home to New York City. Just days later, he was out again to Cincinnati for MobileX. At MobileX, he gave a keynote speech at lunchtime to 400 people about how new trends in social media can help targeting capabilities in mobile advertising. He landed in New York City at 2:30 in the morning, and was at a roundtable meeting by 8am. Then just half a week later, he was back on a plane to Austin, TX for SXSW.

“The past 2 weeks have been insane, I’m not usually this crazy,” he says over a phone call. 34-year old, Nihal Mehta is an entrepreneur, investor, professor and philanthropist but he’s best known as the founder and CEO of LocalResponse, a new social advertising platform that’s generated quite a lot of attention in the New York City startup space. He is what many refer to as “the busiest CEO I’ve ever met”.

In 2001, Mehta moved to San Francisco right after the dot-com crash to start a mobile marketing agency. He says he “was flying in when everyone was trying to fly out”. He grew his business during the day and paid his bills by DJing and throwing parties at night. Eventually his company, ipsh! raised funds and was later sold to Omnicom in 2005.

Mehta moved to New York City shortly after, where Omnicom is based. Recalling one of his first experiences as an entrepreneur in New York City, he says, “After introducing myself, ‘Hey, I’m an entrepreneur’, people would say, ‘Oh sorry to hear that, let me buy you lunch.’ In SF, it was like, ‘Let me get your autograph!’ The culture has dramatically changed here in New York City. The financial collapse of ’08 has helped. Now, it’s cool to be the entrepreneur. Startups are on the world stage. It’s still not like San Francisco in terms of density but it’s definitely a close second.”

LocalResponse is startup #5 for Mehta. “I have a bunch of scars already all over the place,” he says. “I always talk about startups in 4 laps. The first lap is getting your product to fit the market — basically pivoting your business until you find something that’s unique in the marketplace and received really well by customers. The 2nd lap is getting funding. The 3rd lap is monetizing. The 4th lap is, where does the company go? Do you sell it? Or take another round to grow?”

Mehta says LocalResponse is on Lap 3. He began Lap 1 in 2007 with Buzz’d, a consumer product for users to buzz a location and tell people what’s happening. “We grew it up to a few million users and it was all on mobile web but it was hard to monetize,” he says.

Mehta pivoted his business into a B2B ad tech layer for the social web, measuring intentions like checkins on Foursquare, Facebook status updates, Instagram photos and pins on Pinterest. “When you pin something, you’re broadcasting to the world what you’re interested in. We help marketers respond to that intent.” This was a big revelation for Mehta and his team; in April 2011, they launched LocalResponse to be a leader in the social, intent-targeting advertising space. “It was the best birthday present ever! We had found our pivot! The NY Times broke the story!” he says.

One year later, LocalResponse is now a 20-person team with offices in Chelsea, and Mehta is focused on raising venture capital. In March, he hired Emily Keith, the former National Sales Director of ValueClick, which tipped the gender balance at LocalResponse, making it one of the only NYC startups with more women than men.

“I had a really strong mother growing up,” says Mehta, whose parents were both immigrants who came to the U.S. with nothing and turned it into the American Dream. ”I’m still a mama’s boy. All my life, I’ve surrounded myself with very strong women.” Speaking of strong women, Mehta is getting married this year. He says his fiancé, Reshma, is even more ambitious than he is and that “she’s the only women who doesn’t yell at me when I’m on my BlackBerry.” But with the two are not having an easy time planning. “My fiance can plan an amazing fundraiser for the President and I can build and sell startups but we can’t f*cking plan a wedding!” he says, joking.

When he’s not planning his wedding and spending 60-70 hours a week on Local Response, on nights and weekends, he’s an investor and takes time to meet with entrepreneurs. “One of my New Year’s resolutions was to meet a new entrepreneur every day,” he says. “If I cant do that I’ll teach a class to 30 entrepreneurs at NYU and stock up Karma for 30 days. I do that to give back because I feel so fortunate in my life and for my experiences. Also, as an investor it helps with deal-flow. That’s a side-effect of giving advice to entrepreneurs, they often refer you to deals that are really interesting.”

Mehta started investing in 2006; his first deal was AdMob, which was acquired by Google in 2009 for $750 million. After that, he and 3 friends from UPenn started a fund called Eniac Ventures, which has since made 25 investments in mobile tech companies, half of which are in NYC. Mehta says they will have a total of 40 investments by the end of this year.

Mehta, who’s of Indian descent, is an active investor in the India Internet Group. “I managed to hook up with 2 amazing partners to look at early stage Indian and mobile companies that are almost taking a page out of companies that have succeeded in the U.S. There are 930 million cell phones in India but there’s no Amazon of India or YouTube of India — yet– these companies are coming and they’re coming fast.”

Mehta has spoken at Columbia, NYU, General Assembly and in various cities around the world. Last April, he spoke in Qatar on entrepreneurship. “In the Islamic world, if you have debt on your balance sheet as an entrepreneur you go to jail. In the US, you file bankruptcy and start over. One of the biggest inhibitors of starting something new in Qatar is their legitimate fear of failure.”

Mehta is also a philanthropist. After 9/11, he and a few friends launched Project Ahimsa, a benefit for victims of hate crimes. They initially raised money to benefit awareness and help Muslim and Hindu families who were targeted for hate crimes. It morphed into a foundation that empowers children with music education as music can help create self confidence and help kids with empowerment. “Hopefully when things slow down in other ventures, I can spend more time on this,” says Mehta. “It keeps me balanced.”

Speaking of balance, we asked Mehta how he really strikes a work life balance, or better said, how he maintains his sanity with so much on his plate.

Since he’s getting married in a matter of months, Mehta says he and his fiancé try to have at least one night a week together without their BlackBerrys. “I joke that I first fell in love with her because she was on her BlackBerry more than I was. We have such a passion for our projects that we don’t necessarily need a break. When you’re passionate about something, all you want to do is dream about it and do it all the time. When I go on vacation 3-4 times a year, I can’t wait to check my email. It’s not because I’m addicted, but because I’m so into it.”

Mehta still has his DJ booth set up in his apartment. “I dont feel like I’m burning out. I feel like investing and operating works both sides of the brain. I’ll also play music and DJ a friend’s party. I’ll go out 3-4 nights a week. You’ll find me at Soho House, a lot. I think I’ve found a pretty good balance, nothing feels like work — it’s a part of my life. There’s no clear black and white anymore.”

Mehta enjoys plane rides as a great way to catch up on work and sleep. “For any flight over 30 minutes, I’m out. On the weekends, I sleep for 12 hours a night but during the week, I’ll catch just 5-6 hours.”

“I’m on the Wedding Diet now, which means no carbs,” he answers, when I ask him about his health regiment. “I don’t eat pasta, breads or any gluten products. I love running. I ran the NYC marathon 2 years ago and was captain of the track team in high school. More than anything, running provides mental relaxation. I live in Chelsea so I run on the west side up and down the Hudson river, and I love doing that on the weekends after 12 hours of sleep. I try to do something at the gym every other day, or three times a week. It’s good for your mind and body to be in sync, relaxed and in shape.”

I ask him if he’s noticed a sense of martyrdom in the startup scene lately — you know, all those founders checking in at the office on Saturday morning and broadcasting out to everyone just how hard they’re working. “You’re going to burn out at some point,” he says. “It’s great to pull all nighters once in a while but you can’t sleep in the office all the time. You shouldn’t set an example for your company that way. It’s important to let them know they can take a vacation whenever they need to. Be as passionate as possible and know that a work-life balance is just as important as working really hard, because in the end, that’s the most important element of sustainability.”

4 Mobile Trends to Watch

Jessica Richards  |  April 17, 2012 

As a marketing professional, I spend a lot of time learning and educating on digital trends. With the current rate of growth, mobile marketing has been one of the most exciting to monitor. The data on user adoption is changing almost daily, with consumers actively changing the way they consume, share, and publish. To keep up with these changes, brands and media companies are regularly making advancements that impact our industry. For this column, I spent some time with my agency’s mobile strategy team to define the top four current trends.

More Data Capture, More Targeting

Advertisers have been able to target by location, content, and demographics for some time now. Recently “social targeting” and retargeting across mobile-enabled platforms has emerged. The new capabilities represent a significant opportunity to hone ad delivery. They also allow for greater customization of messaging.

• Social targeting (e.g., partners like LocalResponse, Twitter, and Facebook): Scrapes social conversations tied to location to target users. Great for determining very specific communication opportunities.
• Retargeting (e.g., partners like Tapad, BlueCava, and Adelphic): Uses connected devices that require registration to trigger usage patterns. Technology can then serve ads based on data collected.

The “Holy Grail” will be a connection point and solid data capture between all digitally enabled platforms (desktop, IPTV, phone, and tablet)…but you can’t be too greedy.

By Combing Social Media, LocalResponse Gets Down to Business

By: David Mielach

Picture this.

You are fed up with AT&T’s customer service, so you change your Facebook status, tweet your displeasure or post in another social media forum to let others know just how you feel about AT&T. Seconds later, you receive a message, not from your friends, but from Verizon offering you $100, if you switch. 

Think that sounds like something out of the future? Think again. That is an actual campaign being conducted by a new social advertising platform calledLocalResponse.

“This is a relatively new phenomenon that people are raising their hand and saying, ‘I’m here,’” said Nihal Mehta, CEO and co-founder of LocalResponse.  “They are broadcasting their location and what they are doing.” Mehta said his company analyzes that data and helps marketers respond with relevant offers.

LocalResponse is able to do that by analyzing data posted on Twitter, Facebook, foursquare and other social media platforms to target customers both with banner ads and exclusive offers that apply to people’s purchasing decisions.

I always knew I wanted to create something on my own

LocalResponse launched in 2011, but Mehta’s career in business began well before then. 

“My real inspiration to start my own business came from watching my parents build a business in the basement of my house when I was 7 years old,” Mehta said. “I literally got to see the Ping-Pong table turn into a full office. My dad came over from India in the 1970s with $1,000 in his pocket that he had borrowed from his uncle. It was definitely the American dream story. I always knew I wanted to create something on my own.”

That interest was strengthened when Mehta interned at Microsoft. In 1999, when Mehta was a senior at the University of Pennsylvania he started Philly Tonight, an Internet-based city guide. Soon after starting the business Mehta had a tough decision to make.

“A big turning point happened when I graduated college,” Mehta said. “I was offered a job with Goldman Sachs, I still have the signed offer letter in my possession, and all of a sudden we had a website that was growing as well. My parents told me, ‘You can always go back to Goldman Sachs, now is the time to jump into your business.’  I never looked back.” 

Philly Tonight soon turned into a network of city guides called Urban Groove, but when the dot-com bubble burst, Mehta was forced to adapt. 

“We created a program with Philly Tonight that allowed any user to put in their phone number and select what city they were in and what music they liked,” Mehta said. “So if you liked hip-hop and you were in New York City we would text you that evening our hip-hop recommendation for that evening and that service became really popular. That was before there was interoperability with text messages on different carriers and we registered 10,000 people in a short amount of time.”

Mehta felt there was potential to take that feature and turn it into a business-to-business service. In 2001, Mehta started ipsh!, one of the first full-service mobile marketing agencies. After initial struggles, Mehta soon had McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Proctor and Gamble and Unilever as clients.  The success of ipsh! drew the attention of top marketers.  After months of negotiations, Mehta sold ipsh! to Omnicom in 2005.

Mehta began working for Omnicom and started investing in other businesses, including AdMob, which was acquired by Google in 2009 for $750 million. Mehta soon tired of his new role. 

[Local Business Goes Digital in Myriad Ways]

“I left Omnicom in 2007 because I was itching to create again,” Mehta said. “I wanted to start my own business again. I started a company called buzzd and that was essentially a real-time city guide that allowed people to post what they thought of a bar when they were there and people could read the post.”

When the location-based services arena became crowded with several other applications, Mehta used his marketing and B2B knowledge and turned buzzd into LocalResponse. With the help of co-founders Kathy Leake and Michael Muse, LocalResponse now serves clients like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Walgreens, Microsoft and Verizon, to name a few.         

“It started with SMS, then it was banner ads and now it is this,” Mehta said. “I truly believe with all the data out there that this is a huge opportunity. Google monetizes intent to research to the tune of $6 billion a quarter.  We are trying to monetize intent to purchase everywhere else, which we hope has the potential to be a piece of that.”

Currently LocalResponse has 19 employees and the company has offices in New York City and Chicago.

You can have the moon if you want it

“The thing I always tell other entrepreneurs is, you never fail until you quit,” Mehta said. “That is something that I live and die by.  All of these businesses go through ups and downs, you run out of money and things happen, but if you don’t quit you will find a way.”

Mehta credits his father for instilling that confidence in him at a young age.   

 ”My dad always told me I could have anything I wanted,” Mehta said. “My dad would say, ‘You can have the moon if you want it,’ and that stuck with me at a young age. It influenced my confidence and my ability to persevere.”

A FIELD GUIDE TO Female Founders, Influencers & Deal Makers

“You cannot be an expert in everything, but if you are confident in your deep knowledge of particular area of tech, you will always be respected.”

Jessica Lowe is the CTO of LocalResponse, a NY based startup which has built the first platform to help marketers respond to real-time consumer intent. Jessica has a long career in technology; after receiving a BS in computer science she spent over 15 years as an engineer, favoring the NYC startup community.

On misconceptions about women and tech: “I think the biggest misconception about women and tech is that women make better technology managers than hard-core programmers. When I started my career I felt pressured to play more of a client facing and management role before I was ready. It was my desire, after studying computer science for 4 years, to do head-down programming and use my new skills to solve real world problems. I wanted to know technology deeply before I could advise clients or colleagues on a specific direction.”

On advice for budding women techies: “My advice to women who are budding techies is to “know your tech”, and know it well. Throughout my career, I have encountered a lot of egos from programmers who want to prove they know more and can do better than every other techie in the room. Instead of feeling intimidated, especially when I found myself to be the only female techie in the room, I armed myself with expertise. You cannot be an expert in everything, but if you are confident in your deep knowledge of particular area of tech, you will always be respected.”

(Source: afieldguideto.com)

Walgreens sends a shopper a coupon as soon as she checks in

Bill Siwicki

Walgreens’ mobile check-ins offer coupons, promos and value

Customers who check in at one of the drugstore chain’s 8,000 locations through Facebook or Foursquare get messages directing them to products, offering coupons, or informing them of donations.

By Matt Wilson | Posted: February 22, 2012

At most businesses, checking in using Foursquare or Facebook can earn you a badge, or the reward of avoiding a call from a worried spouse or mom who wouldn’t otherwise know why you’re late for dinner. Walgreens is taking it a little further.

“Our goal is to provide real-time value to our more than 6 million daily customers, at scale,” says Adam Kmiec, director of social media for Walgreens. “That means figuring out a way to connect with customers at each and every one of our nearly 8,000 community drugstores.”

Here’s how Walgreens is doing it: Using social media monitoring tools from LocalResponse, the company finds tweets announcing check-ins at its stores. Walgreens’ social media team replies to that check-in announcement with a reply directing customers to new products, offering them coupons, or telling them about how their check-ins can do some charitable good.

Going local

Walgreens started working with LocalResponse last summer, Kmiec says. It’s the first retailer that’s working with the company to offer promotions.

Those promotions differ depending on the time of year or what’s on sale. For example, the drugstore chain’s recent Twitter responses to check-ins have directed customers to Halls Warm-Ups cough drops. The company sent more than 5,000 of those tweets in January, and they have continued into February.

“Sometimes that value is in the form of an offer, other times it’s a tip, and in the case of our program with Halls, we’re providing seasonably contextual product information,” he says.

Kmiec says he’s not worried that customers might think of the messages the company sends in reply to check-ins as spam.

“We have strong insights that guide our decision, and safeguards in place to always make sure we are providing value,” he says. “There are definitely check-points in places to make sure the content we’re providing is relevant, appreciated, and business-driving.”

The company continually tweaks its messages based on customer feedback, Kmiec says.

More than tweets

Other times, Walgreens has offered coupons in reply to check-ins. For instance, checking into a Walgreens store got some customers a coupon for a $2.99 pack of Energizer Max batteries. To receive the coupon, customers texted the message “MAX” to a Walgreens number, and the coupon would arrive on their phones.

Customers redeemed those coupons at a higher rate than they did other digital coupons, Kmiec says.

In other cases, checking in to a Walgreens store has afforded customers the knowledge that they’ve helped someone. In September and October, the company donated a free flu shot to charities including AmeriCares, the American Diabetes Association, the National Urban League, and others. The company put the recipient charities up for a vote on its Facebook page.

“The Flu Check-In program was a multiple award-winning initiative that had never been done before,” Kmiec says. “We broke new ground, demonstrated our commitment to innovation, drove our business, delighted our customers, and at the same time helped to provide flu shots to people in need.”

According to a YouTube video, Walgreens pledged more than $6 million in flu shots as a result of the program.

Customer response

Customers have reacted to Walgreens’ check-in responses in an “overwhelmingly positive” way, Kmiec says. “Local Response has been happy with the click-through rates; they’re operating well above industry benchmarks, and our social media sentiment analysis has shown more than 90 percent of customers feeling good about the program.”

He says Walgreens has new types of messages and offers to test in the coming months. It’s all part of Walgreens’ larger mobile strategy. The company’s mobile app also includes coupons, as well as a tool that enables customers to get their prescriptions refilled by scanning a barcode on their medicine vials.

“I can’t share our product or campaign roadmap, but I can say that there will be programs in the coming months that will reinforce our commitment to innovation, mobile, local and real-time communication,” Kmiec says. 

Top Stories in Digital: Grammys, Valentines, Mobile and Fashion collide this week

February 18, 2012 / Author: Harley Jebens

It’s been quite a crazy week in the digital space with Whitney Houston’s unexpected death, and the 54th Annual Grammy Awards — not to mention Valentines Day all taking place. But there has also been some interesting news in the mobile and fashion industries worth sharing.

This week’s Top Stories in Digital explores how the Grammys, Valentines Day, mobile and fashion have all collided, most for the good, but some for the bad, in the digital space this past week.

The Future of Location-Based Marketing: More than just check-ins

• While Foursquare certainly opened our eyes to the potential of location based marketing to mobile phones, we have just scratched the surface of what LBS marketing has to offer
• Location-based technology will redefine behavioral targeting, and some brands are already starting to test the waters
  • Walgreens is using LocalResponse, a check-in aggregator, to tweet mobile coupons to customers who check in on mobile apps including Foursquare, Yelp and Facebook — letting customers in on deals while they shop. Read more here
  • The idea for marketers to reach consumers in real-time based on where they are going or where they have been is not far off
    • See how eBay, Jet Blue, and The Weather Channel are looking to advancements in location based technology to capitalize on mobile commerce here
• Mobile evolution is advancing rapidly as mobile web adoption is happening 8x faster than traditional web adoption. Read 5 facts shaping mobile commerce here

The worlds of Fashion and Technology collide as Oscar de la Renta invites his fans to help inspire his next collection through an interactive website known as “The Board”

• Piggy-backing off the success of Pinterest, this new site brings to life a user generated inspiration board in the fashion world