Yahoo has lost another one of its longtime top advertising tech execs, as Advertiser and Publisher Solutions VP Dev Patel ankles out the door.

(I would have posted a photo of him, but the first thousand images I searched for were for the Indian star of “Slumdog Millionaire,” no matter what keywords I put in. Thus, a revolving door.)

Patel came to Yahoo in 2005, after it bought Whereonearth, a local and mobile search start-up where he served as CEO.

Patel has worked on a number of products at Yahoo, most recently its Smart Ads for Homepage offering, which are personalized ad units optimized using user data. It is powered by the Silicon Valley portal’s acquisition of Dapper, which Patel led.

Patel, who worked under Yahoo products head Blake Irving, is reportedly leaving for personal reasons, although others said he was frustrated by its current management. (Or both!)

The person to be appointed to the job is Marie Tahir, who will be VP of design for Marketplaces, according to multiple sources.

Tahir will be part of the company’s global product management team and will report to Dane Glasgow.

She will assist with the monumental design challenge confronting the company as it tries to connect commerce across all the various platforms, such as mobile, local and social.

Tahir, pictured right, worked at Intuit, where she held two VP roles, one of which was focused on the development of consumer-facing products, such as TurboTax mobile, Web and desktop services. She also wrote the book “Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed” on the subject.

Her appointment coincides with an internal effort at eBay to beef up design and bring the user experience into the discussion earlier. The company uses the fancy name of “pre-viz,” which stands for previsualization, to talk about the role.

Some of the company’s artsy mojo can be seen externally at ebay.com/design/, where eBay’s designers show off the company’s culture.

Similarly, eBay-owned PayPal recently hired Sarah Brody, a seven-year veteran of Apple, to help with global design at the payments company.

The network will compete with Apple’s iAd and Google’s AdMob networks, and is available to iPhone and Android developers and publishers looking to monetize their games or applications through advertising.

It could be particularly powerful because it taps into AT&T’s thousands of local salespeople, who work directly with local pizza places, dry cleaners, movie theaters and restaurants across the country.

The mobile ad network joins AT&T Interactive’s existing properties, including search on the Web or mobile at YP.com. A separate subsidiary prints the yellow directory that is delivered to your doorstep. The company’s interactive revenues have an annual run rate of $1 billion.

As an example of how big this business is getting, last year Google disclosed that mobile ad sales were now at a $1 billion annualized run rate. Google’s business is international and consists of both search and in-app mobile advertising.

While AT&T would still have a lot of catching up to do, David Krantz, AT&T Interactive’s president and CEO, said in an interview that he’s hoping its ads result in higher click-through rates because they can target a person’s location with more relevant ads.

Based on a three-month trial, Krantz said prices and fill rates were falling somewhere in between Apple’s iAd at the high end and Google’s AdMob or Millennial Media at the lower end. In the trial, which included 750 million impressions, costs per click ranged between 25 and 30 cents.

“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.

Most of the major ad networks also try to serve more relevant ads based on location, but oftentimes it is difficult if they don’t have the sales force. Greystripe was focused on regional advertising before it was purchased by ValueClick, and Where had also latched on to the idea, before it was acquired by eBay’s PayPal.

AT&T’s ads will appear in any application as long as a person has opted to share their location. If a consumer clicks on a banner, it will direct them to a landing page from inside that application that will include click-to-call information, directions, reviews and coupons.  (Note: AT&T Mobility customers will not be treated any differently from subscribers on other wireless networks.)

AT&T is also launching a daily deals service sometime soon, but it is not part of the launch at this time.

Advertisers who are already part of the YP local ad network will not pay more to participate. AT&T pays the publisher on a pay-per-click basis.

Two of the applications that participated in the beta were Pinger and Skout. In a release, Pinger said it achieved CPMs three times higher than with other ad networks serving ads that were not local.

Krantz said AT&T’s ad network was built in-house with the help of Plusmo, which it acquired in September 2009.

Here’s an internal memo, titled “Platform for Growth,” just sent out by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, in which he buries the lede by noting the business partner of content czar Arianna Huffington, Jon Brod, will move to work on its local Patch effort and MapQuest mapping unit full time.

General managers previously reporting to Brod will now report directly to Armstrong. Brod came to AOL from its acquisition of Patch, which Brod ran.

Second, AOL also elevated an exec as Chief Analytics Officer and head of something called Project Management Organization.

And, the company has further simplified its branding structure by moving some of its brands under the Huffington Post Media label, which it had already talked about doing. It’s essentially a streamlining of a previous streamlining.

Here is the email:

From: Tim Armstrong
Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2011 08:29:19 -0400
To: Tim Armstrong
Subject: Platform for Growth

AOLers –

We spent the last week in France at the Cannes Lions Festival, which is a global meeting of the advertising community (the technology industry has CES and Cannes is becoming the “CES” of global advertising). After finishing Investor Day and the global company meeting two weeks ago, the trip to Cannes further underlined the opportunity we are starting to take advantage of — that content and brands are the next wave of the Internet.

Content, Brand Advertising, Video, and Local are going to be at the center of the web and mobile for the next decade and we have made bold moves to position AOL at the forefront of those areas. We have a powerful portfolio of assets as a company and by matching our people, brands, and marketplace-defining products, we will simply get stronger, better and faster.

We are going to further strengthen our content brand portfolio to put maximum leverage into key areas of growth. We are also investing in the leadership structure of the brands and the overall analytical framework we have as a company.

The brand portfolio simplification and investments we are announcing today come from our core strategy, the metrics of growth we see in the business today, and the expanding opportunities we see in the marketplace. Every brand metric was thoroughly reviewed and thoughtfully discussed to get to the list we are sharing with you today. There are a set of brands we will continue to run as stand-alone brands because they have built strong organic traffic, significant customer bases, and unique market positions. There is another set of brands that will gain usage, a larger customer base, and deeper content by becoming part of the Huffington Post platform.

We want to make this transition as simple and intuitive as possible for employees, consumers, and advertisers, so we’ve set up a link to the brand site to review the complete list of brands and USPs.

The AOL Huffington Post Media Group technology platform is the end result of a company wide effort combining the very best content, video, ad, and data technologies from the Blogsmith platform with the best technologies from Huffington Post platform — and we’ve been hard at work adding many new capabilities as well. This combined platform simply has no equal in the digital content space and features an innovative approach to coverage, with edit and tech teams working closely together, and a “hyper-efficient editor” model that enables editors and reporters to rapidly deploy all the tools available to create and disseminate stories. We have integrated in 5min video, AOL demand analytics, and AOL’s data platform deeply into the system, and we will soon be running all of the advertising through AOL’s ad platform. Editors are not silo-ed but empowered to quickly bring their stories to life — and to millions of readers. This leads to engagement on a massive scale, creating an editorial ecosystem with high-quality content, leading edge blogging, commenting, and social sharing capabilities that are easily scale-able and enable real-time speed and a more holistic approach to covering news and engaging audiences.

Here are some quick statistics on the benefits we are seeing in combining sets of brands and platforms:

· When we migrated AOL News to the HuffPost platform we saw significant increases in organic traffic with search entries per UV increasing 195% and social entries per UV up 142%.
· By combining Politics Daily with HuffPost Politics content, social interactions, which include HuffPost comments, FB comments, shares and re-shares, FB Likes, tweets, re-tweets, and email shares reached 3.3MM.

· Adopting Huffington Post style blogging in the Patch platform allowed us to sign up 5,000 bloggers in 2 weeks.

The goals of the brand and platform investments are the following:

1. Grow traffic and grow revenue with high quality experiences for consumers and advertisers
2. Be the leader in content CMS and CMS for Ads (Devil + Social)
3. Simplify the business process and increase profitability in each vertical area
4. Scale video and International
5. Create a culture of speed and transparency on all fronts

In support of the brand investments, we are also making people investments. The current GM structure around the content brands will report to me and I have met with all the GM’s to discuss each vertical opportunity. Local will be broken out as a vertical and is a space where AOL is in a leadership position. Jon Brod will focus full-time on AOL’s local efforts, including Patch and Mapquest. Jon is the co-founder of Patch and has spent the past few months successfully integrating the Huffington Post and AOL media. AOL local has a lot of exciting products coming out this summer and we will be connecting many of those products to our larger business.

We are also announcing a new position that will have a positive impact across AOL — the formation of a Chief Analytics Officer and Project Management Organization (PMO). Tim Lemmon, currently working in Ned Brody’s Advertising.com Group, is being promoted to CAO, reporting directly to me, and will oversee and drive analytics and project management on a company-wide basis. Data and analytics are key to our success and we will continue to look for Tim to provide fact-based guidance and executional focus for all of AOL. Tim’s current AOL Analytics team including Pricing and Yield Management will continue to report to him.

I’ll be holding a working meeting today at 11am EDT with the Sales team to discuss the new brand structure, the HuffPost platform, and the supporting org structure. The meeting information is available on AOL Today and anyone is invited to dial in if you are interested in learning more. Go AOL! -TA

Talking to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong earlier this week about its investors day tomorrow, he used the word “execution” a lot.

No, not the kind evoking a firing squad if he did not succeed at turning around the New York-based Internet giant soon as he has long promised.

Instead, Armstrong was referring to reassuring big shareholders and Wall Street analysts that AOL was now in a mode of making sure all its many moves to turn around the company will finally begin to pay off.

“Basically, our point is going to be about fully operating around the strategy we’ve built,” said Armstrong in a wide-ranging interview. “It seems right for investors to ask about executing on what we have been doing for the last year and a half.”

It’s certainly the right message for the charismatic executive to be delivering, as he and other top AOL execs present their plans moving forward, especially after what has turned out to be a very hyperactive year.

After deep layoffs, a massive rejiggering of its management ranks and a number of shifts of its business focus, without much advertising increase to show for it yet, Armstrong has also pushed through a series of acquisitions.

It culminated in the high-profile and decidedly dramatic purchase of the Huffington Post in January for $350 million in cash.

Now, said Armstrong, deals will be taking a back seat to products.

“We are diligently staying on strategy and really focusing on products and services,” said Armstrong. “We have laid out the path we are on and now investors want proof of the concept.”

To Armstrong, that means the push of “branded content” and a continued focus on significant properties in key topic areas.

Tomorrow, in news that could worry investors, AOL will be noting that traffic is flat year over year, but explaining that it is due to the outsourcing of its sports and health sites.

“If you added that back in, we would have had a phenomenal year of growth,” said Armstrong. “Our main point will be that this is the right path for AOL.”

In fact, in an unusual wording, he said AOL was betting on the “urbanization” of the Web around big branded sites, which is, in many ways, exactly where the Web was a decade ago with Yahoo, Excite and others.

But Armstrong will be making the point that this retro idea is perfect for today, as marketers look for quality content that attracts big audiences, which has seen its most energetic application in the Huffington Post.

Thus, his linchpin remains the flashy news site’s even flashier co-founder Arianna Huffington, who has cut a very wide swath through AOL’s content efforts since Amstrong made her media czar of the company.

As Armstrong did, she also stressed the focus on unique visitors and ad growth, more video and a laser focus on local.

This includes shoving editorial into every AOL property, including unlikely ones such as Moviefone and MapQuest, and integrating it all to point back to the Huffington Post mothership.

“Much better editorial integration is a centerpiece of what we are doing, surfacing content in new places it was not before,” said Huffington, who used examples of local stories via its Patch unit that have gone global with a special push.

And by global, that also means the creation of new content sites in Europe and elsewhere, in order to build this unusual dream of a fully aggregating world.

“It is a big test of the HuffPo platform aggregation to do this,” said Huffington, who has clearly longed for the kind of money and staff to do this for a very long time. “It has moved a lot faster than I thought it would … but it feels good to be moving on so many fronts at once.”

Many fronts indeed, which might make investors pause. So far, those shareholders have had a continued wait-and-see attitude toward AOL, which has seen its stock decline almost 13 percent from its late 2009 IPO debut.

That’s mostly due to worries about whether the continued and expected fall-off of its lucrative access business can be met by similar increases in its ad business.

That share drop has been especially steep since the beginning of the year, but it has also not been drastic, indicating an interest in continuing to believe Armstrong’s confident — well, confidently delivered, at least — narrative.

As Citi’s Mark Mahaney wrote in a one-hand-other-hand note yesterday about the investor day:

Positives: 1) AOL still remains a top 5 U.S. Internet property; 2) In the latest quarter, AOL’s Display segment grew Y/Y for the first time in ~3 years, and this improvement seems sustainable; 3) At 4x ’11 EV/EBITDA, AOL’s valuation is among the lowest of any ’Net Stock. Negatives: 1) Deteriorating fundamentals; 2) Significant market share losses — ’Net usage, Display Advertising revenue & Search queries; 3) A significant profit hole from the structural decline of its Subs biz; 4) Substantial competitive risk; and 5) An unproven (@ AOL) management team.

“We all like Tim and what he says makes a lot of sense,” added one big investor, who is also attending and has many questions about the efficacy of what AOL is doing, in a common sentiment among its large shareholders. “But we also need to see real results soon.”

Let it be said: For a digital information junkie such as myself, traveling abroad without any cellular or consistent Internet connection on my spanking new white Apple iPhone is agonizing.

To explain: I switched from AT&T to Verizon recently, in order to actually be able to make voice calls with regularity in San Francisco.

Unfortunately, Verizon does not go international. And, although I am carrying another local feature phone for calls, I am without the rich multimedia mobile experience that I usually get day to day at home.

Worse still, an “unlocked” iPhone only went on sale in the U.S. — which would allow me to use a SIM card bought in Europe –Tuesday, after I left.

Poor little me, I suppose, and there is certainly no need to cry any big, fat digital tears on my behalf.

Still, without the constant certainty of a Wi-Fi connection as I move around, it’s disconcerting for someone whose life has been jacked into the matrix 24-7-365 for far too long to be without consistent digital interconnections.

More to the point — as I watch endless legions of Europeans, who seem even more entranced by and stranded on their individual smartphone islands than in the U.S., obsessively checking out their devices every second — the concept of being completely out of touch with the pulse of the world while in the world is an odd one.

Or, at least the Twitter-fied world, in which I get short bursts of all kinds of information all the time. It takes the lack to understand what it means to be always checking in.

This is a big dose of the obvious, of course, but it was brought home to me in a can’t-miss piece in The Daily, published yesterday by the iPad news service and available here.

Titled “Speed Journalism,” it’s a succinct but important discussion on the push and pull between the ephemera of information we are increasingly getting from real-time Internet sources such as Twitter and the need for longer and more reflective pieces.

Wrote Trevor Butterworth: “The question is whether technology is diminishing our appetite or capacity for this kind of storytelling.”

This is not a new revelation, of course, but it bears repeating and considering again and again as we increasingly use these myriad social-local-mobile — so-lo-mo — devices.

And, as this so-lo-mo way of the encountering the world grows, it creates deep expectations of ever more detailed and immediate information about the world around you that is mostly immediately consumable and highly useful.

Whether this is a good thing or a bad one, I cannot tell yet, except to say that the last time I was here in Copenhagen, I was just 18 years old and I mostly wandered around in circles with an outdated guide book and without a clue.

As it turns out, without my super-duper-smart mobile phone being super-duper smart, very little seems to have changed.

Groupon VP Mobile Partnerships Michael Shim said: “Mobile is huge for Groupon…I believe we could see us doing 50 percent of deals sold/purchased in the next couple of years.”

Shim made the statements this morning at Mobile Northwest, an all-day event in Seattle sponsored by Miller Nash, where a good portion of the day’s discussions are focused on the intersection of mobile and commerce and payments.

The opening morning keynote was delivered by K.C. MacLaren, Starbucks’ director of mobile and emerging platforms. MacLaren said the coffee retailer is the largest mobile payments company, with 8,000 outlets. In January, it rolled out an iPhone app nationwide that allows people to scan their phone to pay for a drink.

MacLaren said so far usage of the application has exceeded expectations, with millions of users. Three months after the app launched, the company revealed that more than three million people had paid using Starbucks Card Mobile.

Right now the application isn’t about incremental revenue, he said, but about driving loyalty. Other iterations in the pipeline include an Android application and the ability to order a coffee for pick-up in the store.

Shim talked about a new service launched last Tuesday called Groupon Now, which allows users in the Chicago area to make a timely purchase decision on when and where they want to eat lunch or dinner–or maybe even go see a movie.

Shim said the service has also exceeded expectations, with more than 1,000 merchants already signed up to offer real-time deals. “We’ve been inundated with demand. Groupon Now is about local discovery. What can I find around me?…We are just getting going on where we think it will take our business.”

The logo of the 12-year-old publicly held company is a block of unevenly placed capital letters. “Travel” is in royal blue and “zoo” is in bright red. The site is equally blah, where the top 20 travel deals keep with the aesthetics and are listed in the same two primary colors.

Travelzoo is a no-frills destination to discover travel deals, which is in steep contrast to today’s dominant trend–established by Groupon, LivingSocial and Gilt Groupe and others that believe in selling an experience with big visuals, beautiful photography and flowery descriptions. In contrast, Travelzoo is more like opening up the classifieds.

Shirley Tafoya, Travelzoo’s president, said it still has a big opportunity in front of it, leveraging loyalty it’s garnered across the relationships it has made over more than a decade, even though the perception is that its much younger competitors have grown up around it.

“We’ve run the business so conservatively and we did that on purpose. In the beginning, we were very methodical on not growing the business too fast and to get the quality of the deals right,” she said. “We want to build loyalty. We don’t want to be the fly by night provider, or just another deal site, and I think that’s what has happened with the competition.”

Still, she admits that it is the competition that has propelled them into new markets. “It’s forced us to make it even more unique, and go into areas that people aren’t addressing. We have continued to raise the bar. We could probably do more quicker, but we don’t feel it’s necessary.”

To be sure, the company has hit a couple of big milestones recently.

In the first quarter, Travelzoo reported record revenue and celebrated its second-best quarter ever of subscriber growth. Today, it hit 23 million subscribers, a third of which are outside of the U.S. And, as of March 30, it delivered its one-millionth deal. Just last week, Travelzoo’s stock skyrocketed to $101 a share, before tumbling back to earth. Today, the stock was trading up 37 cents at $75.40 a share.

But despite its obvious comparisons to Groupon and LivingSocial–and a host of other daily deals sites, which are also getting into the travel business–its market capitalization is a mere $1.3 billion, a far cry from Groupon’s rumored IPO value of $25 billion.

Encouraged by what they were seeing in the local commerce space, Travelzoo launched two new products over the past year. Last quarter, it rolled out a new travel service, which promotes deals within driving distance of a user’s hometown. Last July, the company rolled out local deals, such as discounts to restaurants and spas.

Those businesses are modeled after the Groupons of the world, where consumers must purchase vouchers, and Travelzoo shares the revenue with the merchant. However, its main travel business operates much differently. It’s an advertising model, where the provider pays to get its special offer in front of all–or a portion of–Travelzoo’s 23 million subscribers.

So far, so good. The company is already seeing huge growth from its local deals business.

Its local deals revenues have doubled in the past three months, and it’s already publishing a weekly deal in 48 markets. In the first quarter, gross revenues from daily deals totaled $16.2 million, or roughly $34,000 per deal. It’s ramping up its local sales team quickly, and is forecasting $312 million in annual revenue if it can grow to two deals a week in 100 markets with 20 million subscribers.

As for the decision to keep things plain and simple and not add a lot of flashy photography, she said that’s what consumers prefer.

“We’ve done a lot of focus groups. They like the pictures, but the facts are more important. What is it? What’s the value? Why should I travel now? They know where to go to see the pictures. What’s most important for them is the facts. Our top 20 is text based, and that’s been on purpose.”

As the VP of social at eBay, Bradford will head up one of the company’s four main focus areas that it identified earlier this year. In addition to social, the other three areas are mobile, local and digital payments.

While most of those areas have already been accounted for through recent acquisitions, including Milo and Where–and eBay’s PayPal division–social was mostly unspoken for.

We are hearing that Bradford started at the company on Monday and will be reporting to Dane Glasgow, eBay’s VP of global product management. A company spokesperson declined to comment.

While it’s a unclear what Bradford will be working on exactly, the e-commerce company has been experimenting with some social projects, including group gifts, which makes it easy for multiple individuals to collectively chip in to pay for a gift for someone else.

Bradford is known for being a long-term Microsoft employee, having left only seven months ago to join Yahoo. At Microsoft, he worked on Bing’s user interface team in Mountain View, Calif., and previously worked on Microsoft Live Search communities and MSN Hotmail.

In October, he joined Yahoo as VP of Communities as engineering lead for Answers, Address Book, Delicious, Flickr, Groups, Koprol, Meme and Pulse, according to LinkedIn.

Bradford will be based in San Jose.

CafeMom, a social-networking and community site aimed at mothers, is expanding its offerings to daily deals, as well as announcing an anticipated launch of a site aimed at Hispanic moms.

The deals effort has just been launched under the killer URL of Mom.com and will first be available in the Northern New Jersey area.

The sales force, which will presumably compete with armies of sales people from social buying phenoms such as Groupon and LivingSocial, will be made up of local moms in these markets.

The “Mamas Latinas” site–which is still unnamed–will be run by former People en Español publisher Lucia Ballas-Traynor, who has just been hired by CafeMom.

In an interview yesterday, its co-founders Michael Sanchez and Andrew Shue said the New York-based CafeMom was aiming at another major growth spurt.

Said Shue of the effort so far: “It’s just two dads trying to create the definitive mom’s site.”

There is a lot of competition in the space, such as iVillage, which is more broadly aimed at the lucrative women’s space.

But CafeMom had attracted attention too and had considered a number of acquisition offers last year, before deciding to expand its service on its own.

Last summer, in fact, Yahoo and several other companies expressed interest in the possibility of acquiring CafeMom.

After considering a variety of offers, said Sanchez, who is CEO of CafeMom, “We think we have a unique opportunity to grow ourselves and not for someone else.”

The company has been knocking around for a long time in Internet terms, morphing from a sister company owned by CMI Marketing called ClubMom back in the Web 1.0 days.

CMI, which was also founded by Shue and Sanchez, finally got two big fundings in 2008 totaling $24 million, from venture firms such as Highland Capital Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Moving from what was essentially a glorified bulletin board for moms, it has added content and other social-networking tools and games.

For example, it recently launched a blog and content platform named “The Stir.”

Shue and Sanchez said the main CafeMom site now has 7.6 million million unique monthly visitors on its main site and almost 21 million on its overall network of affiliated sites.

The pair said that CafeMom is profitable, with 100 employees. It now has revenue of about $36 million annually.

Here’s the official press release about the Hispanic moms site:

CafeMom, the #1 site for moms with more than 7MM monthly visitors, to launch new website for Hispanic Moms

Outgoing publisher of PEOPLE en Español announced as co-founder.

New York, New York May 4, 2011–CafeMom announced its plans to launch a web destination catering to Hispanic moms in the coming months, to be co-founded by Lucia Ballas-Traynor, a Hispanic marketing veteran and the just-departed publisher of PEOPLE en Español. As part of its market research, CafeMom conducted a major national study of Hispanic moms, across the acculturation spectrum, and found that 92% of Hispanic moms believe there is not currently a website that clearly serves their needs.

“There is currently a huge gap online in serving Hispanic moms,” said CafeMom CEO, Michael Sanchez. “By 2014 one in four moms online will be Hispanic, and advertisers are increasingly looking for ways to reach this key segment. The site represents a tremendous opportunity, both to add value to millions of moms’ lives and to deliver unique integration possibilities to the brands that are most committed to the Hispanic market.”

CafeMom conducted a nationally-representative study of Hispanic moms fielded in both English and Spanish with a well-respected third party research vendor. The study showed Hispanic moms are underserved online, and are also eager to connect with each other. 79% of Hispanic moms said they wanted to connect with other Moms who share their culture, heritage, and life experiences.

Co-founder Lucia Ballas-Traynor brings her 25 years experience in Hispanic media, and has been at the helm of leading Hispanic media brands such as Univision’s Galavision, MTV Tr3s and most recently People en Español, the largest selling Hispanic magazine in the U.S.

“Our plan is to leverage CafeMom’s expertise in community, content, and strategic programs for leading brands and combine it with a world class leadership team that has a deep understanding of Hispanic moms and media,” said Sanchez. “As part of this effort, we are excited to bring Lucia on to the team. She has a proven track record in delivering for consumers and advertisers alike.”

“I’m thrilled to be working with CafeMom on this,” says Ballas-Traynor. “CafeMom is uniquely positioned to deliver this opportunity as an authority on moms. I’m confident that we can create something that will add real value to the lives of millions of Hispanic moms.”

Hopefully, consumers will find it a sweeter deal than last time.

Three months ago, FTD.com offered a Groupon deal of $20 for $40 worth of flowers and gifts on for Valentine’s Day. But the offer was yanked early after users called the deal a scam. The coupon, which was bought by thousands of people, directed buyers to a special website to take advantage of the offer. The problem, users said, was that prices were higher on that site than on the regular website.

This time, the voucher will be applied at the check-out to any regular or sale item found on FTD.com. People can pay $15 for $35 worth of flowers and gifts to be delivered on Mother’s Day. Or, they can spend $12 for $30 worth of flowers for any day after Mother’s Day.

The FTD offer on LivingSocial demonstrates how daily deals are not just for local commerce, but how national brands are increasingly willing to test (and re-test) the effectiveness of driving awareness to their businesses through discounts and mass mailings. (In a separate post today, I write about a day in the life of two local LivingSocial employees who make sales calls in Seattle.)

LivingSocial has run national deals before. In conjunction with Amazon.com, which has invested in the Washingon, D.C., company, it offered $20 gift cards to the e-commerce web site for ten bucks. LivingSocial had a hard time fulfilling the 1.3 million vouchers purchased. It’s also worked with Fandango to sell movie tickets.

This deal also highlights the rivalry and competition building between Groupon, which is the market leader, and LivingSocial, which is smaller but gaining.

Mitch Spolan, who is heading up the effort at LivingSocial as the SVP National Sales, has only four weeks under his belt, having come most recently from Yahoo. Fueling the storyline that LivingSocial and Groupon are in a tight race is that another Yahoo exec, Lee Brown, who Spolan worked with closely, left Yahoo late last year to head sales at Groupon.

Spolan was particularly cheerful last week delivering the news that LivingSocial had a deal coming up with FTD.com, even after its experience with Groupon. To rub it in even more, Spolan brings up another sore subject (although he swore it was an accident).

“Mother’s Day is the Super Bowl of flowers,” he said. “More flowers are sold for Mother’s Day than any time of year.”

Yes, the Super Bowl. The same event in which Groupon rolled out its first advertising campaign that managed to offend its users. It had to yank it (just like the FTD offer).

This deal with FTD will be different, Spolan swears. “We are providing a great deal for our members, and are fully disclosing everything. The offer is available to all the products on FTD.com, and in addition, we put the fine print in plain English. It’s crystal clear before they hit the buy button,” he said.

It’s unclear how the revenues on this deal will be split between the partners.

Typically, half of what the consumers pay for the voucher goes to the retailer or merchant, and half goes to LivingSocial or Groupon. It’s the split that could suffer under steep competition, especially since it’s not always going to be a two-horse race. On a national basis, Facebook and Google have thrown their hats into the ring, along with dozens–if not hundreds–of competitors on a local level.

Spolan’s confident of the company’s leading position.

“If we went back eight months in time, there were two companies that had 90 percent market share and today there’s two companies that have 90 percent market share. On a local level, it’s true, but from a national level, that’s less so. They [the brands] are looking at that market share position.”

In an interview, Rob Apatoff, FTD’s president, told me he didn’t think that the Groupon offer was unfair. Traditionally, consumers haven’t been able to combine multiple offers, so why should it be different in this case? “There was confusion with a group of consumers. We talked to Groupon at the time, and we decided to honor both discounts,” he said. “The consumer got a better deal than the one they signed up for. We addressed it immediately. We let the consumer win.”

The consumer will also win this time because the voucher will be applied to anything on the site, including sale items.

Apatoff said he believes that group buying fits in with the company’s social media strategy, which it is committed to having as part of its marketing mix. But it’s too early to say if they’ll do another offer.

“We’ve been happy with the partners that we are in business with now. We are happy with the company we are keeping,” he said.

Margo Georgiadis (pictured here), VP of Global Sales Operations at Google, will be COO of Groupon, Google confirmed.

She is currently located in Chicago, where the social buying site is headquartered.

A Google spokesman confirmed the move by Georgiadis, while Groupon–which specifically denied a query about her appointment that BoomTown made Tuesday–dithered.

In a statement, her boss, SVP and Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora said:

“I’m grateful for all that Margo has done for our team over the past two years. We will miss her, but we’re also very excited that she’s joining a terrific company and a great partner for Google.”

Besides COO, I will officially bestow the title of “Chief Cat Wrangler” on Georgiadis, for the massive organizational job ahead for her at the notoriously chaotic start-up. (As evidenced by Google being the company confirming a major Groupon hire.)

Still, Groupon’s growth had been stunning. It now has thousands of employees and has already washed out one COO, former Yahoo exec Rob Solomon, whose departure was reported here.

It has also turned down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google, raised a badillion dollars in venture funding from tech’s top investors and also is prepping an IPO valuing the company at upwards of $15 billion.

Phew!

Georgiadis must bring calm to this perfect storm.

Because of her solid resume (see below) and quiet demeanor, I had included her in a list of candidates several weeks ago and had queried the social buying company about her specifically this week.

In fact, when I asked for a comment if Georgiadis was hired on Tuesday, a Groupon spokeswoman said: “This would be news to me. Nothing to announce yet.”

At the time, Google had the class to simply say “no comment.”

(Lesson learned!)

Crain’s Chicago Business’ John Pletz first posted on Georgiadis’ hiring earlier today.

In any case, Georgiadis is just the kind of candidate that Groupon has been looking for–a competent and experienced sales and operations exec who would not overshadow its quirky CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason.

As I wrote two weeks ago:

Lastly, and perhaps most important, the Groupon COO candidate is going to have to accept that the role will not be a CEO-in-waiting, either before or after its inevitable IPO in the next year.

While I have received several tips that co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason might not stay its principal exec, extensive checking with sources inside and outside the company indicate that such a move is highly unlikely.

“Andrew is beloved to the board, by investors and, most of all, by employees,” said one source. “He’s not going anywhere.”

Indeed, Mason has a close working relationship with co-founder Brad Keywell, as well as Groupon co-founder and Chairman Eric Lefkofsky.

In fact, despite other business interests, Lefkofsky has been very involved in all key decisions with Mason.

That job, presumably, would fall to the new COO, which Groupon should be hiring sooner rather than later.

“Groupon needs a world-class COO, who can manage hyper-growth, but also who knows that a No. 2 stays in the background while doing it,” said another source. “That’s a tall order.”

Groupon has looked at a number of top execs, most specificially at former DoubleClick and Google exec David Rosenblatt. Sources said the high-profile exec did not want to play second fiddle to Mason or move to Chicago.

That’s moot now. Here is Georgiadis’ bio at the Silicon Valley search giant, which shows why Groupon picked her:

Georgiadis is responsible for driving Google’s sales operations and strategies across regions, channels and products as well as leading the sales technology teams which enable the successful commercialization of Google’s products (e.g., AdWords, AdSense, display and mobile ads) with advertisers and publishers.

She also leads the company’s local and commerce businesses, working to extend services like Checkout, Google Places and commerce search to small and large businesses alike.

Before joining Google, Margo was a principal in Synetro Capital LLC, a private investment firm based in Chicago. She also spent five years as the executive vice president of card products and chief marketing officer of Discover Financial Services where she led a radical turnaround of business performance and revitalized its rewards leadership with award-winning new products, customer experience and marketing. Prior to Discover, Margo was a partner at McKinsey and Company for 15 years in London and Chicago. She was a leader in the firm’s marketing and retail practices, and also co-founded and led the customer acquisition and management and retail marketing practices.

She has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.