AlterGeo Launches Local Hero, First Open Hyper-Local Ads Distribution System in Russia

Moscow, Russia, December 9, 2014 (Newswire.com) - Eastern Europe's location technology market leader AlterGeo opened a hyper-local ads system, Local Hero, designed to distribute banners across the Russian Internet in an instant while restricting their exposure to as little as small neighbourhoods. This is the first ever publicly available service of this kind in Russia.

Local Here is deployed at www.localhero.ru as a self-help service. To launch narrowly geo-targeted campaigns, all one should do is put a mark on the map and specify a required radius, starting from 500 metres (0.3 miles). Local Hero disseminates the customer's banner right away through RTB systems (ad exchanges) across both desktop and mobile versions of millions of Russia's most popular websites, only to expose it to those Internet users located within the pre-determined area.

"Conventional online ads can target a city or even a region at most, whereas Local Hero allows advertisers to focus on particular districts, neighbourhoods or blocks and thus prevents overpaying for needless exposure on remote territories," explains Anton Baranchuk, CEO at AlterGeo which is also a member of the Skolkovo Innovation Center.

The hyper-local feature is provided by AlterGeo's hybrid positioning system, which was previously applied in the advertising industry only by ads agencies and networks within the framework of complex campaign packages. The new Local Hero solution is a retail product which discloses the hyper-local promotion advantages to all audiences and budgets. It is expected to be particularly valuable to local businesses because most customers of restaurants, fitness clubs, hair salons, shops and other similar companies live, work or just pass nearby.

Local Hero is also expected to be highly demanded in other fields, e.g. during election campaigns. That said, the technology passed testing in September 2014, before the Moscow City Duma elections: banners with candidates' images were being shown only in the respective voting districts they stood for.

"Local Hero will make the whole Internet advertising much more attractive to multiple enterprises and organizations that used to get poor benefits from this channel before because of the inability to restrict a target promotion territory precisely. They will become our customers and thus will involve in the online ads industry, so we can expect a new wave of growth in this market," believes Anton Baranchuk.

Hyper-local advertising becomes more and more demanded around the world. Mostly, it implies ads exposure on mobile devices, whereas Local Hero allows banners to be spread to desktop computers too. In October 2014, Facebook announced their plans to launch hyper-local advertising on their website, and began its testing in the United States. Local Hero does not bound customers by any single platform and its audience, thanks to the integration with RTB systems, and is already available in Russia