Lasso looking to bring real-time, social web to local ads

Some of the hottest new companies in local advertising aren’t using technology that is all that new. Groupon, for example, attracted $30 million in funding based on a simple once-a-day email that is powered by a direct sales force.

But that doesn’t mean that innovation isn’t happening. Companies like Paper G are using technology to streamline or enhance the local advertising experience. And a new entrant into the space, Lasso, is looking to leverage social media and the real-time web to push local advertising to keep pace with the digital age.

“We kind of focused on what comes after the group purchasing hype,” Lasso CEO Chris Treadaway says. “We’re not sure it fits a lot of local businesses. Those who have a different margin structure – it is a lot more painful giving up 75%.”

Lasso is a platform positioned to enable local media companies to reach small and medium-sized businesses with attractive new offerings: integration with social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and distribution through customizable widgets throughout a media company’s website.

Treadaway, who says the self-funded company is about to close its first round of investment, wanted to build something to take advantage of the growing popularity of social networks when he left Microsoft two years ago – at a time when Facebook only had 40-50 million users. He discovered that local media, struggling as they are, still have a good concentration of traffic on their websites. And those websites attracted different people.

The Lasso platform powers the Drink Specials widget on quickdfw.com.

The company’s first experiment is currently live on QuickDFW.com, the entertainment site of Belo’s Dallas Morning News. Treadaway says it is merely a small sampling of the full platform, which will launch in late April with “a major media partner in a top 10 US city.”

While technology is a big part of Lasso’s offering – all ads are geocoded and can be distributed through email or SMS alerts, for example – sales and marketing are critical, too. So Treadaway has brought in sales training talent with experience at companies like Scripps and Belo.

“We have combined internet marketing expertise plus newspaper DNA. An effective product has to have the right metrics, and in terms of landing it appropriately, it has to be done in terms that newspaper ad sales people understand,” Treadaway said. “If people don’t feel like they’re getting value, the churn will be very high. The product demos very well, looks very slick by newspaper standards. Most of the response has been: ‘when will you come train our people.’”

Below are some preliminary screenshots Treadaway provided, without branding.

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