So if people have seen that the Internet is primarily a marketing platform that increasingly influences local sales, why isn't the money flowing quickly online in recognition of that fact? Enter the panel I moderated at the ShopLocal Summit in Chicago yesterday. Among the panelists were my former colleague from The Kelsey Group, Peter Krasilovsky, as well as Centro's Shawn Riegsecker, Starcom's Sam Wehrs, speakers from Toys R Us, Target and NSA Media. (It's a very interesting event overall that addresses the "product side" of local vs. the services side, which always get the attention.)

The reasons given by panelists for the failure to shift more budget from traditional media online were many and varied: inertia, budget silos, organizational culture and politics, the fact that online is still novel for many traditional marketers and the inability to show direct ROI in many cases. Most of us have heard some or all of these explanations before. But it's kind of amazing that things are still moving relatively slowly, despite some high profile exceptions such as GM.

But in an earlier keynote comScore's Chairman Gian Fulgoni spoke about some things that I was unaware the company is doing with its panel: looking at credit card receipts and tying names and addresses to in-store databases (e.g., national retailers and grocery store chains). Fulgoni stressed that these records are made anonymous and that the matching is being done with privacy safeguards. But this gives comScore high levels of visibility on offline purchase behavior.

With this empirical view, Fulgoni in fact confirmed that the behavior is just as expected: people do online research and buy overwhelmingly offline. That's not to say that traditional media have lost their influence, but it does validate the central project and proposition of this blog.

This methodology cannot be extended to every campaign so it might not answer the direct ROI question in each case but it's pretty compelling stuff.

Another theme in Fulgoni's talk was the bargain that brand advertisers and retailers are getting with online display advertising, which is providing brand lift and having an impact on in-store sales, but is dropping in price:

Fulgoni argued against clicks as the relevant metric and measure of value and suggested a return to CPM across the board. I later argued to him that the "culture" of online advertising was such that this would be extremely difficult. In fact, it's moving in the opposite direction.

We thus have the following situation:

• Online is where the consumer audience is doing critical research on products and services - a critical time for brands to intercept them
• The lion's share of ad budgets remain offline
• Other than search, online advertising offers a huge bargain but that's not fully understood; most marketers and brands simply don't see clearly the lift and value they're getting or could get from online
• Brands and marketers, by not utilizing online marketing and all the available tools fully, are not able to capitalize on the capacity to take people online "from search to store."

On one level all this should be remedied in time and with more data like that Fulgoni showed to the audience. But for many there remains a conceptual understanding that still needs to penetrate: the Internet is not about e-commerce; it's about driving in-store sales.

Here's another example of the "local opportunity" (or National Brands Going Local) that I've spoken about recently: leading customers to the point of sale. Where2GetIt powers Columbia Sportswear's maps and directions; it's also showing users where they can buy Columbia's products in their area:

One can shop online or find where products are sold locally. This isn't real-time inventory information but it's the next best thing.

Consider the potentially missed opportunity in the absence of this type of information. Let's say I want to buy the Columbia sandals and I don't know where in my area. I can buy them online but chances are I want to see the sandals first (unless I already own them and I'm just replacing them). Thinking I would find them there, I might go into a sporting goods retailer such as the Sports Authority or Sports Basement. Maybe the sandals are there and maybe not. Once at one of those stores, I might be inclined to buy another shoe because it's in stock, I like it well enough and my time is precious. So much for the Columbia sandal: the loss of a sale and a loss for the brand.

But since Columbia is doing this I can see where to buy the shoes in my area. I call the store, hopefully confirm the inventory and ask for them to be held. I show up and buy more stuff in addition to the sandals.

I may have been prompted by a traditional ad or other stimulus to search online but eventually I'm likely to end up on the brand/OEM site. Once there, I'm directed to the point of sale in my area. And voila: from search to store.

The partnership allows Local.com to leverage White Directory Publishers’ national sales channel to market and sell Local.com’s display advertising inventory to national companies with local and regional business locations throughout the U.S.

The ads will also appear on the White Directories online properties. We should see more such deals as national advertisers recognize the opportunity that online local marketing offers them: leading the consumer to the point of sale.

Somebody yesterday called my attention to an interesting piece in AdAge, which is an interview with DirecTV's CMO. Here's the relevant bit for my purposes:

Three years ago, the marketing strategy was pretty much to have this one national marketing strategy. The reality of it is that the competition is local. The competition is not national competition. The competition is Comcast. It's Time Warner. It's Cox. It's Charter. It's Fios. And you've got to be able to really understand what's going on and understand where things are heating up geographically, where they're dialing off, and read and react and adjust your plans accordingly.

(my emphasis)

The iPod and the Zune, the iPhone and the Blackberry are competing on a national stage and so are many brands, but purchasing is almost exclusively done locally. Here are the top 25 advertisers in the US according to AdAge:

1. Procter & Gamble Co.
2. AT&T
3. Verizon Communications
4. General Motors Corp.
5. Time Warner
6. Ford Motor Co.
7. GlaxoSmithKline
8. Johnson & Johnson
9. Walt Disney Co.
10. Unilever
11. Sprint Nextel Corp.
12. General Electric Co.
13. Toyota Motor Corp.
14. Chrysler
15. Sony Corp.
16. L'Oreal
17. Sears Holdings Corp.
18. Kraft Foods
19. Bank of America Corp.
20. Nissan Motor Co.
21. Macy's
22. Anheuser-Busch Cos.
23. Honda Motor Co.
24. Viacom
25. Berkshire Hathaway

Almost without exception all of these folks have local distribution or local sales outlets. But their online ads don't necessarily reflect that and connect the dots. In other words, they haven't connected their digital advertising with offline sales. They need to. Brands like DirectTV (which was a big PPCall advertiser with Ingenio) are waking up to this critical online-offline connection.

Regardless, the medium is a compelling one for advertisers and relatively easy, from what I'm hearing, to sell -- provided you have a sales channel. Video also has implications for SEO and for conversions on mapping sites.

Among the providers:

• TurnHere
• SpotRunner
• Mixpo
• SpotMixr
• Jivox
• Spotzer
• Denver Mulitmedia
• ImageSpan

The list goes on . . .

Video distribution and related video ad networks will be the next frontier. Now that I've got my video ad where does it show up? Much like websites, if you build it they won't necessarily come. A good ad will be basic, but exposure will be even more critical.

Companies like AgendiZe and Mixpo are layering all sorts of capabilities, tracking and response mechanisms on top of video. And beyond SMBs, video offers a potentially powerful opportunity for brands to capture attention and direct consumers to local stores or points of purchase.

Source: comScore

These are all fast-food places, which fulfill locally -- meaning people come in to local outlets to buy things. There are a total of about 877 million impressions here for the month of March according to comScore. The average CPM for March was $0.49, according to PubMatic.

If you do the math, at a crude level these impressions were worth a total of approximately $429 million. If that holds constant over a 12-month period, that would represent about $5 billion dollars. It's unlikely that these figures are in fact accurate. But consider that this is an example of where, potentially, billions of dollars in online advertising are being spent to drive in-store sales.

Arguably this should be counted as local online advertising.

Correction: I've failed to divide the numbers by 1000. So they're inflated. But the point is the same: this should all be considered local advertising, even though it may not be specifically geotargeted.

Products, services, it doesn't really matter; e-commerce is a fly on the posterior of an elephant. That "elephant" is the local market.

The Internet is fundamentally a research tool that helps people decide what to do and where to spend money -- offline. Travel is an interesting hybrid and something of an exception. But everything else is a footnote to Internet-influenced offline transactions. When I talk to people and tell them what I cover I say "the impact of the Internet on offline consumer purchase behavior." Reactions are interesting; people are typically surprised but then a light bulb goes off and they get it.

Historically however the discussion about "local" has largely been about restaurants and about the difficulty of aggregating small business advertisers. But that's only a part of the story. Thought about and seen correctly, local swallows everything else going on commerically online. So why do I feel like I'm almost alone in repeating this message?

It's because the ad infrastructure (and tracking) and advertisers themselves (be they large or small) haven't caught up to consumers. The process hasn't been "transparent" enough to everyone.

In order to put local in its proper context, I'm now convinced we a new discussion framework to talk about it and make it accessible to a broader group of advertisers. We need to talk about demographic targeting or leading consumers to the POS. But the Internet itself is highly fragmented and local even more so. It's difficult for agencies and advertisers to coordinate campaigns and make a "brand" buy and then tie that to locally targeted ads where people can actually buy the thing being promoted. (Marchex is attempting to do something like that with its new AdHere network.)

Certainly there are efforts to build "direct display" or "branded response" ads that help people find local dealers or vendors. And mobile marketing is being used to varying degrees this way. Ultimately, however, online and traditional media must be integrated to help build awareness and then show consumers where to buy things. At a crude level this is what consumer behavior looks like:

This is more or less what Google found with a study (12/07, n=1003) it did on newspaper print ads and response to those ads:

This 38% figure is high and not representative of the population as a whole. But it illustrates in a very specific way the relationship of traditional media and online consumer behavior. This is a complete picture of what's going on. And online is a mirror of this, with consumers moving from site to site for information:

The dots need to be connected up and down the line to help lead me from offline prompt or stimulus to online research/consideration to a POS offline. Once that becomes more transparent for advertisers then the Internet's full potential as an advertising medium can be realized.

There is no reason to get in high dudgeon about every trendy metaphor for human activity. There is a pointed and persistent human desire to explain one's life activities by recourse to metaphors involving some other experience-- and thus corporate people, who have the most legitimate claim to use the language of branding in the modern sense, often compare their work to sports and war.

But there is something significant in the fact that "brand" is quite suddenly the ubiquitous word for identity, for recognition and for the gestalt of good or bad connotations connected to an entity in politics and culture alike. That is, those activities that have long and often quite specifically claimed to give citizens and patrons an experience that at least partially transcends the market have now made the vocabulary of the market their own without shame or hesitation (or scare-quotes). It is one more sign that citizenship and a kind of aesthetically enriched self (and the conflict between these two possibilities that so fascinated a cascade of modern thinkers from Rousseau to Henry James to Lionel Trilling) are both increasingly under the shadow of the market as the supreme arbiter of modern experience.

I confess that I am not inclined to say that this is just fine, that our new gonzo-capitalism is simply the way things will and in some sense ought to be, to quote Tyler Cowen and Freakonomics and pretend that all or virtually all human experience can be reduced to a kind of hidden market logic based on rather low human interests and motives, and that it takes a clear-sighted no-nonsense truth-teller like the author himself to tell us that. What is quite specifically missing from this kind of account are ideas of form, of essence, and of relationality. The language of "brand" denotes a kind of superficial and infinitely fungible externality, and it does say something about our culture (not everything about our culture, but something) that this and other externalizing, shape-shifting market metaphors have spread like kudzu in several domains of human experience where they had for so long been greeted with intense ambivalence or even disdain.

CityVoter

The voting on CityVoter offers high levels of engagement with local (and vertical) audiences. In addition, CityVoter's registration data offers demographic profiles of users. Hence advertisers get access to specific, engaged users (voters) in local markets. People complain about how social networking isn't working for advertisers. But this appears to be a different case.

The proof of concept was its relationship with Exercise TV for the lauch of that cable channel:

Between January 28 and March 23, ExerciseTV and CityVoter invite fitness professionals and their clients or friends to nominate themselves or their favorite trainer at www.exercisetv.tv/toptrainer.

And here were the results:

Between January 28 and March 23, nearly 10,000 people voted for their favorite Boot camp gym, cardio instructor, dance instructor, general fitness trainer, kickboxing instructor, personal trainer, pilates instructor or yoga instructor. Eight trainers were awarded the title of Top Trainer, one in each of the listed categories. The contest drew almost 100,000 unique visitors to the ExerciseTV site.

The company is now working with other brands in similar ways. In addition to national promotions, the site continues to work with local media partners to capture SMB ad dollars.

The voting concept is a very smart one. Even though other sites offer "best of" lists and voting, this is core to the CityVoter concept and helps drive participation by a broader number of users.

Direct mail is worth more than $50 billion annually in the US. This is all about demographic and local targeting. When you enable more precise targeting online than IP/DMA/Metro area then you get into buying neighborhoods that represent certain populations brands are interested in reaching: Hispanics, families with kids, people with incomes over $100K and so on. (Trulia just did a version of this with its new ad network; YouTube is adding demographics to its "insights" reporting.)

Imagine a car OEM that wants to target all its would-be buyers in the US online. They fit a certain profile and may be concetrated in certain metro areas. How would it do this? Local targeting of course (once the sub-DMA level capabilities kick in). Advertisers aren't there yet, however, and they don't fully understand this opportunity.

The search engines don't fully understand the opportunity either or they'd be working to build out the capability and educating their advertisers accordingly. By adding Skyhook Wireless' technology to a toolbar (think Yahoo, Google, MSFT, ASK) this could be done today. Also registration addresses and default location settings allow this today. Think of all the branding dollars that suddenly might look at SEM quite differently if these capabilities were in place.

That's one side of local. The other side is the point of sale.

Leading people to where they can buy something and/or recognizing that most purchase behavior is offline is the other half of the true local opportunity. That involves the question of tracking and inventory feeds. Those challenges are being addressed in various ways. The inventory data is being syndicated and that will only grow over time. However, the tracking question remains one that can't be perfectly answered and will require a patchwork of solutions: directions lookups, phone tracking, coupons, mobile response and so on.

What I'm trying to get across here is that local sould be seen as the biggest and most important opportunity online -- once the advertisers clue in and the technologies develop to the point where targeting can be more precise.

Overall, in 2007 newspaper Web sites netted over $2 billion in local online advertising. Thus, according to Borrell, they dwarfed online Yellow Pages sites--which got 9.5% of local online ad spending--local TV Web sites (also 9.5%), and radio stations, which got just 2.1%.

The Borrell study also found that video is the fastest-growing segment within local online advertising--expected to rise from $363 million in 2007 to $1.2 billion in 2008.

MarketWatch adds:

The biggest newspaper sites generated most of their revenue from nonprint advertisers for the first time, with online-only customers accounting for 59% of the newspaper sites' total ad revenue in local markets.

Historically the newspaper numbers have been larger because of newspaper accounting practices that included as "online marketers" print advertisers that paid any additional money to be included in the online product. So the statement above is very significant. The MediaPost piece quotes a Harvard study, however, that contradicts the Borrell findings from Q3 2007.

Determining who is a local advertiser on newspaper sites is also a tricky business. The working assumption in the Borrell data must be that most if not all advertisers on those sites are targeting local. It's a reasonable assumption but may not be correct in every case. I haven't seen the report so I can't determine if sites like the WashingtonPost, USAToday, LATimes or NYTimes are being counted here. These are all newspaper sites that have national reach.

Here are the top 30 newspaper sites:

1. NYTimes.com — 17,177
2. USATODAY.com — 9,939
3. washingtonpost.com — 8,478
4. Newsday — 6,450
5. Wall Street Journal Online — 5,409
6. LA Times — 4,607
7. Boston.com — 4,364
8. Chicago Tribune — 3,891
9. Daily News Online Edition — 2,956
10. New York Post — 2,851
11. SFGate.com/San Francisco Chronicle — 2,785
12. Philly.com — 2,300
13. International Herald Tribune — 2,250
14. Village Voice Media — 2,224
15. Chicago Sun-Times — 2,186
16. Atlanta Journal-Constitution — 1,974
17. The Houston Chronicle — 1,946
18. The Seattle Times — 1,840
19. DallasNews.com - The Dallas Morning News — 1,828
20. Seattle Post-Intelligencer — 1,785
21. The Politico — 1,672
22. Orlando Sentinel — 1,522
23. NJ.com — 1,455
24. Azcentral.com — 1,435
25. Baltimore Sun — 1,332
26. MercuryNews.com — 1,315
27. The Detroit News — 1,256
28. The San Diego Union-Tribune — 1,180
29. Detroit Free Press — 1,168
30. The Washington Times — 1,161

Source: Nielsen (1/08); traffic in thousands

Whatever the reality, newspapers have stepped up their online efforts and online-only sales. They capture a larger share of geotargeted national brand (display/CPM) dollars than other, competing segments in local. And many are now scheming about how to get more of the SMB spend, including using some of the same "agency" strategies that yellow pages have successfully employed.

This morning comes more evidence and confirmation of Google starting to roll out video in AdWords. Here's an example I discovered on a search on Google for Smartphones (note the plus box "watch commercial" on the Blackberry ad):

Yahoo! is also doing something similar:

Video in search ads will be quite common eventually. At SEL I recently wrote a post on how search will thus become a branding vehicle in a big way. The innovation here is that the ads only play when the user initiates them. And the power of directional/search marketing also means that those audiences who do are more qualified and receptive to branding messages and related information.

These rich media ad units will become very coveted and highly effective for marketers and, I'm guessing, for audiences as well. With all the SMB video being developed we're eventually likely to see these ads for local businesses as well as corporations trying to drive local in-store sales and foot traffic.

___

Google Operating System has more on video in AdWords here.

However there are interesting potential alternatives to BT for display, which include units such as Linkstorm's overlays, widgets (e.g., Google Gadget Ads), brand advertising in search results (see also here), and other interactive display units such as Admission's dynamic platform.

Here's an example of the latter's inventory based display advertising:

Clicking on any of the individual cars opens a window as follows that becomes a lead-gen form (and could contain video):

These sorts of ads can take ride on top of BT; however, more importantly, such units can be effective outside of it. They can be targeted contextually to the content of a site or to a geography or both without relying on any consumer data mining. Consumers interact with the ads and then self-select, turning a display ad into "directional advertising" -- the equivalent of the behavior that has made search so effective. (And some of these ad units include a search box as well.)

As mentioned, there are a range of companies offering display advertising with interactive capabilities or elements. But if legislation or regulations are enacted that require tracking notifications and consumer opt-out opportunities, these sorts of alternative strategies to make display ads more effective, by making them highly interactive, are going to be the way that the industry needs to go.

See this related piece I wrote at SEL regarding branding in search results.

____

Disclosure: I'm an advisor to Admission Corp.

AT&T, Inc; which is now known as the New AT&T representing the acquisition of SBC and Bellsouth, is now operating a suite of popular websites and services outside of the traditional landline telephone business. The company operates the very popular www.YELLOWPAGES.com, www.YELLOWPAGES.travel, and a free toll free directory service 1-800-YELLOWPAGES for those that hate paying for 411. It is now official that AT&T owns everything with the “Yellow Pages” branding within the United States.

I don't believe that Yellowpages.travel is owned by or associated with AT&T. Also the language of the release is strange and awkward.

Note this line in particular: It is now official that AT&T owns everything with the “Yellow Pages” branding within the United States. And how about this line: With online ventures such as YELLOWPAGES.com, YELLOWPAGES.travel and 1-800-YELLOWPAGES, they have advanced into the online market nicely.

"They" have advanced into the online market "nicely." Huh?

While ownership of the "yellow pages" brand would appear to be true as a de facto matter and justify the $100 million that SBC and BellSouth jointly paid for the site YellowPages.com, AT&T corporate and YellowPages.com PR would be very unlikely to use this language in an official company press release.

Could this be a fake or fraudulent release? If so there are a lot of "cohones" (as they say in the vernacular) involved. Who knows what's going on with this?

___

I got confirmation from YellowPages.com that this is not a legitimate release from AT&T.  

• Search -- 41%
• Display -- 32%
• Classifieds (which includes directories) -- 18%
• Lead Generation -- 8%

Microsoft is engaged in a project to, depending on your view, a) more accurately capture and reflect consumer behavior by reflecting that a broader range of influences (beyond the "last click") contributes to conversions or b) discredit search (and by extension Google) in the minds of advertisers or c) both.

Here are some paradoxes and truths as I perceive them:

• People are overwhelmed by ads even as advertising becomes more ubiquitous
• Ads that are not "relevant" are less and less effective with consumers who now ignore advertising as a matter of course
• Display ads are less effective than search in terms of response rates (video may become an exception)
• Search is the most effective medium online, but search + brand provides lift to both
• More ad budgets are moving into online branding vehicles than search, with search as an almost "perfunctory" part of a larger online branding campaign

This creates a very interesting situation and a push to make brand/display advertising online more effective -- and in some sense more like search behaviorally. Behavioral targeting is one of the approaches widely embraced by marketers and publishers and hailed as a savior of online branding. However, it's highly problematic because of consumer tracking and privacy issues. The industry will need to quickly establish privacy standards and make them very transparent or outside regulators (especially in Europe) will cut the legs out from under it.

The other approach, which is "cleaner" and more interesting to me, is to turn display into directional marketing (See, e.g., Admission, Linkstorm and ShopLocal). All these companies make traditional display ads more interactive and "directional" by making them more "engaging" and interactive. Indeed, this category can be called "branded response" or "direct display." One of the interesting things that Linkstorm does with video ads is to create a menu overlay that can go on an existing video ad but make it interactive, with specialized menus and landing pages (e.g., store locators, product specs, etc.)

Of course, these direct display ads can also be combined with BT data mining for even higher response rates.

I do think this [Universal Search] opens the door for the introduction of richer media into the search results page. We are now going to understand how users interact with that. And as Alan always likes to say search is about finding the best answer, not just the best URL or the best textual snippet.

For us ads are answers as well. Searching ads is just as hard as searching the Web, as searching images. And so I was hoping that we could bring some of these same advances in terms of the richness of media to ads.

-- Marissa Mayer

Google has been showing video on search results pages for months. Now Google is experimenting with delivery of video advertising on Google.com results. There have been various experiments in the past, mostly notably the "Bourne Ultimatim" campaign in which a "plus box" allowed users to open a video module and watch a trailer on Google.com.

What's radical here is that this brings brand advertising to Google.com -- search is already a branding medium but this makes it more obviously so -- but with the directional efficacy of search. Brand advertising in the form of display ads enjoys limited success out on the Internet, which is why behavioral targeting and other more interactive units (e.g., AdMission's Spotlight Ads and Linkstorm menu overlays) have been hailed as the key to making brand advertising more effective for marketers and more appealing and helpful to consumers.

But the genius of bringing video to Google.com (and concealing it behind a plus box) is that users won't see the adds unless they affirmatively click to expand and play them. This means that response rates will be higher because of the "directional" behavior inherent in search (and the act of "opting in").

Whether or not the DoubleClick acquisition closes (it probably will) Google has a powerful branding vehicle in YouTube, not to mention Gadget Ads and Video for AdSense. But now with video ads in AdWords on the Google.com homepage it has created a vehicle that will likely become a dramatic success. (It will also be applied to local advertisers eventually, either directly or indirectly via YP publishers and others selling those ads.).

The December 2007 report revealed that U.S. Internet users watched more than 10 billion videos online during the month, representing the single heaviest month for online video consumption since comScore initiated its tracking service. Top-ranked video property Google Sites saw substantial growth and extended its video market share gains, now accounting for nearly one out of every three videos viewed online.

Other comScore findings include the following:

• 77.6 million viewers watched 3.2 billion videos on YouTube.com (41.6 videos per viewer).
• 40.5 million viewers watched 334 million videos on MySpace.com (8.2 videos per viewer).
• Online viewers watched an average of 3.4 hours (203 minutes) of online video during the month, representing a 34-percent gain since the beginning of 2007.
• The average online video duration was 2.8 minutes.
• The average online video viewer consumed 72 videos.

The Internet is turning into TV (or a more dynamic version of it) and video will continue to grow as a feature of the consumer experience and as an advertising vehicle. The problem for traditional content producers and brand marketers is that the right ad model has yet to be found for video -- except in the local context, where the content and the ad are one and the same.

___

Flickr is soon adding video, which could become a very successful video destination depending on how they do it. Another thing to note about the comScore data above is how many more video views YouTube has vs. MySpace, its closest competitor (41 vs. 8 per user).

In the greater San Francisco Bay Area, there are more than 15000 restaurants and Zagat carries ratings for about 10% of the restaurants. About half of the restaurants covered are in the City of San Francisco. So, if you are someone who lives in the sub-urban areas, it’s unlikely that Zagat has any ratings for restaurants in your neighborhood. On the other hand, BooRah has ratings on food/service/ambiance for 5000 or more restaurants. We can do this because we do not employ any editors. A scalable system that covers the breadth of local search and can generate the quality of ratings similar to Zagat would make the consumer experience a lot more desirable.

This is not unlike Grayboxx's claims about how and why it's better than Yelp or Yahoo! Local, etc.

But the key question is: do consumers care? Grayboxx and BooRah argue that there's limited or no coverage in non-core urban markets or that their systems cover a much wider range of businesses. While there's truth to them, in the short term these arguments are likely to fall flat or be ignored by consumers who prefer their familiar and trusted brands. Accordingly, Zagat, Yelp and Citysearch will trump less well-known sites. As Microsoft's Steve Berkowitz wisely has pointed out (I'm paraphrasing), it isn't always the best technology that wins, it's the best experience. Part of that experience involves intangibles such as trust and brand.

It's partly why Craigslist continues to dominate the classifieds category even though numerous sites are more sophisticated and arguably more user friendly. There's so much "noise" coming at consumers now that merely reinforces existing behavior. That's partly why Google is so dominant; it's easy and familiar.

The claim is that "the competition is just a click away." But the reality is more complex.

If sites like BooRah and Grayboxx can hold out for the long term – and their funding and investors will remain patient -- they may be able to develop the kind of connection with users that will allow them to become trusted brands. But building a better mousetrap by itself these days isn't enough.