When Google upgraded their Local Business Center to Google Places, it launched the opening salvo in what we expect to be a long war for local advertising dollars.

With local advertising revenues expected to reach $144.9 billion in 2014 according to BIA/Kelsey — and more and more dollars are shifting away from traditional media toward digital media buys — the new war for local ad spend will be a battle between the Internet titans and social networks.

Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Foursquare, Yelp and even Apple are all attempting to carve out their own niche offering for local advertising dollars. Who will succeed remains to be seen, but this is a fight you won’t want to miss.

The War of the Worlds

The challengers fighting for local advertising budgets can be separated into three categories: Search, consumer review sites and social networks. The mobile component to each sector is also quite significant, especially given that the mobile web is taking over the world, and that mobile search is still a nascent space — one that appears to be more app-driven than search-engine driven.

Each category also has its own distinct advantage and key players, but what Google has managed to do with Google Places is straddle all three sectors with an extremely valuable proposition for local businesses that includes free stuff, cheap advertising rates and the promise of exposure.

Google also has a very strong mobile presence, but their adherence to the standard search model for discovery could make them susceptible to competitors vying for local ad dollars.

Search

In the local search space we can include the obvious players: Google and Microsoft, the latter of which will grab more share once the Yahoo search deal is implemented. Both behemoths are fast-adding features to their search services to better facilitate local search queries. Bing even has Foursquare data in maps.

For businesses, the advantages of being highlighted in local search results over competitors is significant. Sure it’s 100% paid media, but it’s also exposure at one of the primary touch points for service and restaurant queries on the web.

Google clearly recognizes the value of a targeted ad. With Google Places they also re-introduced a simpler, faster, cheaper way for their local business customers to advertise (formerly called enhanced listings). Business can pay a $25 per month flat fee to use Tags to make their listings more prominent on Google.com and Google Maps. Included in Tags are Posts, which are like status updates for Place Pages and will appear as part of the search listing.

Tags show up as yellow markers that users can scroll over to view promoted features or coupons. While Tags are ads, they’re essentially Google’s take on Promoted Tweets, and make listings stand out from the crowd. If done right, they could be useful for both businesses and consumers.

When thinking about local search, don’t forget about Twitter. The social network also happens to double as a search engine, and they’re aggressively moving in the local direction with tweet geotagging that can identify points of interest. This extra layer of data will enable Twitter users to search locally, and see a real-time stream of nearby tweets.

Couple these new Twitter features with Promoted Tweets — Twitter’s definition of search advertising — and you have a situation ripe for local businesses. The key here is whether or not Twitter can prove why users should share their location and why local businesses should care.

In thinking about search, remember that mobile will factor into the future in a big way. Steve Jobs believes that most mobile search happens via applications, which means that Apple — which now owns alternative mobile search application Siri — could play an important role in the mobile local advertising battle.

Consumer Review Sites

For the purpose of this post, consumer review sites like Yelp and City Search are being distinguished from other social networks because their primary focus is on user-generated place reviews.

The advertising opportunities on these sites are certainly geared towards the businesses that consumers are reviewing. That could create a conflict of interest for some networks, and in the case of Yelp, many small businesses felt that they were being bullied to pay to advertise in order to remove negative reviews. Yelp has maintained that this was absolutely not the case, and was a misunderstanding of their review filtering process.

As such, they’ve made changes in recent weeks to lessen the confusion, but now that Google Places offers a handful of business-friendly features, we could easily see local businesses jump ship with their advertising budgets.

On this feature front, the addition of service areas is quite significant. So too are the QR code window decals and free business photo shoots. Plus, if Google opts to take Google Maps inside businesses, there will be even more incentive for companies to own their Google Place Page.

In a previous post, I made a case for how the new consumer review is all about you, and that location, premium content and relationships are critical to the relevancy of the consumer review.

In this sense, Foursquare certainly factors into the consumer review equation. Their tips and content partnerships mean that their location-aware mobile social network is perfectly poised to deliver up tightly packaged consumer reviews that are place- and time-relevant. This means that smart local businesses will allocate more of their budgets to checkin rewards and mayor specials.

Lest we forget, there’s a Foursquare-esque component of Google’s Place Pages. All Place Pages include consumer reviews with both text and star ratings. These reviews are also easily accessible via Google Buzz for Mobile and Google Maps.

Social Networks

The primary social networks embroiled in the local advertising war include Twitter, Foursquare, Google and soon Facebook.

Google’s social networking endeavors have left plenty to be desired. Google Buzz launched to an excited tech audience but enthusiasm has since faded away. There’s also Google Latitude — an always-on location-sharing service that started as a Loopt clone — which now has 3 million active users. It’s the intersection of Buzz and Latitude on mobile devices that will help Google nail down local advertising dollars.

Between Buzz for Mobile’s checkin model and Latitude, Google has a lot of information that they can both display for consumer/business use as well as use behind the scenes. Since Buzz checkins are associated with Place Pages and Place Pages have dashboards, Google has the opportunity to compete with Foursquare’s business dashboards. They also have the data to create accurate behavioral analysis around location, based on the implicit location-sharing of Latitude users. Take that and the Google name, and you have something quite compelling.

Unfortunately for Google, Facebook is most certainly moving into the same space. Given their size and trendiness, we can assume that Facebook will be a strong competitor and a viable contender for local advertising dollars. The leaked McDonalds-Facebook location partnership tells us that diners will be able to check-in at restaurants with activity and food items being posted back to Facebook. How exactly this will work or function we don’t know, but what is certain is that once Facebook knows where their 400 million members are, they can target advertising by location.

Twitter is really trying to ramp up relevancy of geo-located tweets, but they’ve never quite been able to do what Foursquare has done — demonstrate the significance of location-sharing. As discussed above, there could be a perfect storm brewing for the day when geo-aware tweets are tied to places and Promoted Tweets are available to all potential advertisers.

Once that happens, we predict that advertisers will be able to target their Promoted Tweets by location and not just keywords (as it stands now). Should they go down this path, this could be their real secret sauce, especially given what we’ve already seen from Virgin America in the Promoted Tweets department.

In the social networking space, don’t count out David — a.k.a. Foursquare — amongst these internet Goliaths. Foursquare has pioneered the location-sharing movement by making checkins valuable, if not cool. The company is hotter than ever, and its partnerships — especially with the likes of Starbucks — continually ensure that it has something the competition doesn’t. Its user base is growing astronomically, and now that the users are there, businesses are clamoring to catch up.

Foursquare has also been nimble in finding ways to cater to local businesses. Early on, it allowed business owners to offer specials to mayors and those that check in. More recently, it introduced a simple way for businesses to sign-up and gain access to the business dashboard with checkin analysis. Its offering not only parallels what Google is doing with Place Pages, but bests it.

By: Ian Fortey

Sex sells, but that doesn't mean that selling things using sex is easy. You figure a little cleavage can go a long way to sell cars or beer, but in the wrong hands a sexy ad can turn into the stuff nightmares are made of.

Not even sexy nightmares, either.

It really is hard to work pedophilia into your ad campaign gracefully. In the 70s, this Love's Baby Soft ad, with a dolled-up, pouty-lipped child and the slogan "because innocence is sexier than you think" appeared in an issue of Tiger Beat magazine.

And really, what better place to convince both young girls and sexual predators that this product can turn a preteen into a sexual dynamo?

We can't figure out whether this ad means the 70s were a much more innocent time (when, what, nobody had heard of pedophiles?) or a much, much sleazier time. From our brief research into the 70s, we're going to go with the latter.

Fortunately, we've come a long way since then...

... or, maybe not.

The Child and Adolescent Reference Center, perhaps worried about the army of pedophiles that Love's Baby Soft ad recruited, figured they needed to raise awareness about the problem. But how? Public service ads are so easy to ignore, and it's crucial that the public understand the horror of this issue.

Hey! Why not diagram a child blowing a dude?

The end result is a bizarre image of an invisible pedophile who's apparently only visible when viewed through some special infrared camera. Parents, your child could be getting teabagged by an invisible pedo right now.

And if the overwhelming awfulness going on in this ad isn't enough, there seems to be an ugly "how-to" vibe at work as well. How many pedophiles saw this and thought, "Rolling chair? Toy truck? Brilliant!"

We shudder to think.

If you're not familiar with the Dolce and Gabbana, you've likely seen the clothes if you've run into a douchebag recently. Apparently eager to distance themselves from the douche demographic, the fine folks at the D and G marketing department decided to aim for those fashionable, gay, gang-rape clubs you're always hearing about.

We could spend the rest of this article detailing all of the untold stories in the above photo. Is the naked victim dead, or just knocked out by heavy tranquilizers? The man zipping his pants, did he just finish, or is it his turn? The man on the right, listening intently... is he so new to the world of rape that he must take detailed instructions from his gray-haired rape coach on the far right?

Like any good restaurant, Burger King is well aware that people love blowjobs. But most ad campaigns that find success by incorporating fellatio into their sales message do so by implying that if you buy their product, you will be on the receiving end of copious amounts of oral sex mere moments later. Burger King, on the other hand, apparently thinks it would work better for everyone if you were to just blow them instead.

According to the ad for their new Big Seven Incher, one of the most atrociously named food products since the McSodomy with Cheese, it will "blow your mind away." Is that what the expression the woman's face is supposed to mean? It kind of looks like she's trying to cope with the revelation that the Burger King mascot has a greasy sandwich for a dong.

Hey, we bet you thought that was going to be the most horrifying oral sex reference on the list. You were wrong, weren't you? Weren't you?

The major selling point for this ad, other than the fact it's for a 9.5-inch long condom, is that you can finally rest easy when you're giving some mostly faceless lady a Joker smile, because you're going to be covered and it's pretty obvious she's going to be bleeding.

You could call this ad "inappropriate" in the sense that it seems intended for someone with a 15-year-old boy's concept of sex. But actually it's perfectly appropriate for the Durex XXL customer: the guy who thinks his cock is so huge that no normal condom can cover it. Dude, you can fit a regular condom over your head. Even if you did have a freakish dick wide enough to rip open a jaw (say, three-inches in diameter), this product still only has one legitimate use: to impress the cashier at the drug store when you're checking out.

Aaaaand with one image we have been turned off of both sex and video games forever.

This has to be based off a dream somebody at Sony had. Or maybe it's the result of a hilarious mistranslation from the corporate office in Japan and the ad design team in the USA. Either way, this woman is about to get caught fucking four giant, hairy, flesh buttons.

There are so many horrible little details here: From the way the living cushions have no human features other than sweat, chest hair and pleasure trails, to the way the cushion on the far right is writhing, like a huge fucking tongue.

Also, if you look on the end of the bed there, it appears one of them came in wearing a fur coat. Have fun with that mental image for a while.

Apparently the ad department at this German magazine couldn't think of anything else that accurately encapsulated what their periodical has to offer the public more than a woman getting oral from a dog. We've all been backed into that corner before.

The series of ads feature nothing more than the word "Deutsch" and then in smaller text the assurance that it's a magazine for international lifestyles. Really, Deutsch? That's how they do it overseas? What country are you talking about exactly?

Maybe this is an attempt at an image makeover, like Dolce and Gabbana, and it all started with them figuring out how they as Germans could put those unpleasant Nazi associations behind them. So really it was this or pedophilia, and that one was already taken.

Coming from the UK, this ad for Patrick Cox shoes demonstrates what happens when ad people realize that shoes are fucking boring and that angry, Greco-Roman man sex will at least draw some extra attention to those boring ass shoes.

On first glance you might think "but those dudes aren't even wearing shoes" and you'd be right, but there does appear to be a female spectator in shoes, watching as one jock-strap wearing greasy man pile drives another jock-strap wearing dude's corn hole on a hardwood floor. See, it's not the official shoe of man rape, it's the official shoe of watching man rape.

The company was disappointed to see their ad banned and responded by pointing out that, since both men have jock straps on, technically no penetrative sex can take place. Thank God for that, otherwise this perplexing gymnasium pseudo rape scene might be weird.

Back to Germany again, where if you can't make someone feel awkward with your ad campaign then you're just doing it wrong. As you can see, this ad clearly exemplifies why this particular brand of vacuum will suit the needs of any home owner, so long as that home owner only needs a vacuum for the purposes of tying up nude intruders and debasing them in front of a mirror.

You know what's really sad about this scenario (OK, other than the dude's thong and knee boots)? That rug looks filthy.

Some products are inherently sexy. The nipple tassel market can't help but be ensconced in sexiness all the time. Lingerie, stripper poles, bananas, all these things carry with them an air of attraction and hotness. And then, on the other end of the spectrum, are products that were specifically designed to clean dirty assholes. Aside from a few "special" people, no one finds these things sexy.

Despite this, the people who make Renova toilet paper thought that ass wiping was a good basis for a sexy ad, the woman looking desperate for access to her man's exceptionally clean anus. Also, their bathroom is a warehouse.

The ad portrays the worst fishing spot in the known world, somewhere in the Dick Ocean, while a naked Disney Princess guides her condom sub through what is undoubtedly the most obscene coral reef in the history of ever. There are dick turtles, dick octopi, dick jellyfish and even a nasty dick anemone that appears to be splooging in the bottom center.

Worst of all? The artist didn't Google "how does a condom work" before putting brush to paper. You don't put the woman in there, silly. That won't even work, unless you're using Durex XXLs.

The message we're left with? Ladies, do not go scuba diving nude or the entire ocean will try to give you syphilis.

We made a joke up there about Germany and Nazis and we're starting to feel bad about it. After all, the Germans are known for much more than Hitler and sexual perversion. Right?

On an unrelated note, here's a German AIDS public service ad featuring Hitler railing some broad from behind. Everybody involved seems to be enjoying themselves, so we're not completely sure who is supposed to be frightened by this. Really, the only message is that you should always knock before barging into Hitler's room.

The idea behind the campaign was to liken AIDS to some of history's more infamous mass murderers, including Stalin and Saddam Hussein, all of whom are pictured mid coitus with models who we can only assume did not inform friends and family of this particular job.