Hyper-local marketing is an important way for local business’ to dominate search results quickly and easily, and it has to do with the mobile revolution. Our connected devices are in fact the next generation of marketing. Wherever we go, the mobile device is connected, and when you tie in the GPS capabilities, you’re able to get messages which are tied directly to your location. Looking for a restaurant, your phone will tell you what’s nearby, who’s been there, and what they thought of it.  People are increasingly using mobile devices to search for things as they’re out and about. This allows for contextual advertising and visibility for both small and large businesses.

An AT&T subsidiary known for its Yellow-Pages products is launching a mobile ad network that would target consumers based on their location. It would be an interesting member of a growing pack that now includes Apple’s iAd and Google’s Admob networks.  These are in fact two important platforms by which iPhone and Android developers and publishers are looking to monetize their respective apps, often subsidized with advertising.

David Krantz, AT&T Interactive’s president and CEO, said that he’s hoping to achieve its ads result into higher click-through rates because they can target a person’s location with more relevant ads.  Another key is AT&T’s cross-platform access, hedging its bets across devices and operating systems.

“We have really high fill rates because of our coverage, and we are able to provide CPMs in between [Apple and Google], so we’ve had a lot of interest in the pilot … We are finding a ton of demand for what we do,” he said.

The time is ripe for mobile ad competitions to emerge.  Apple’s iAd platform has been losing its customers, and was forced to slash prices. High profile clients including Citigroup and J.C Penney have reportedly dropped out of million-dollar iAd contracts they signed at iAd’s launch, now opting for cheaper competitors.

Google’s AdMob, on the other hand, is promising to make m-commerce transactions even easier, with a new service that will use camera phones to scan in payment card details and automatically fill out forms during safe shopping online.

So many would ask how important mobile marketing is. The search industry has become part local recommendation tool, with the association of location enhancing search context, and adding opportunities to the billions of nodes these engines can analyze around it.

Local search sites like Yelp, Google, Bing, and Yahoo all deliver location based results. But social is becoming an important aspect of hyper-local contextualization, and ultimately monetization, as well.  Twitter, Foursquare, GoWalla, Facebook Connect, and Loopt are prime examples of location based tools, many allowing direct ways for a business to connect to their customers. From augmented reality to socially enhanced local restaurant reviews, hyper-local search is only seeing the beginning.