Few companies have seen the ups and downs of the media industry like R.H. Donnelley. BIA/Kelsey President Neal Polachek asked Directonal Media Strategies Day 2 keynote Speaker Dave Swanson, RHD chairman and CEO, to speak about what’s happened and what’s ahead for his company and the industry. The audience was treated to an honest, passionate and …

This session led by Charles Laughlin and Steve Marshall of BIA/Kelsey offered a glimpse into the mind-sets of both SMB advertisers and consumers as they learn to coexist in the digital world. One certainty: The game has forever changed.
These survey results are the latest from Wave 13 of BIA/Kelsey’s Local Commerce Monitor. Here’s …

We just heard from three developers of mobile local search apps, who showed simulator demos and talked about the thinking behind their products.
One of their challenges, noted moderator Mike Boland, is breaking through in a “sea of apps.” Boland noted that there are more than 75,000 apps on the iPhone App Store.
Shooger CMO Matt Myers …

Kelsey Report Program Director Charles Laughlin and BIA/Kelsey President Neal Polachek kicked off the Directional Media Strategies 2009 conference with a view of where the directory industry is currently and where it is going. Laughlin provided a variety of statistics from BIA/Kelsey’s Global Yellow Pages 2009-10 report showing how the global directory industry is evolving. …

Marquette Group CEO Chris Cummings gave a familiar call for industry change today at DMS. He stressed the need to communicate value to advertisers through data toward the end of instilling trust.
“In the end our advertisers will gravitate towards the product that they trust,” he said. “Our responsibility is to prove how accountable we are …

Live at DMS ’09, BIA/Kelsey research director Steve Marshall is presenting fresh data from the most recent round of Local Commerce Monitor (SMB survey). One nugget that came out of the data: 9 percent of SMBs claim to be using Twitter in some way to market themselves.
This number is surprisingly high, despite Twitter’s quickly growing …

Out-of-home advertising is the next frontier and a big one. Usually, we’re focused on digital forms of it, whether electronic billboards on the side of the freeway, an elevator monitor, or a screen by the grocery checkout.
But in a true sign of our “post digital” age (thanks, Dan McCarthy), new forms of non-digital out of …

TargetCast is acquiring Ripple TV, according to an announcement on Ripple’s site today. DailyDOOH’s Adrian J. Cotterrill posted rumor of this announcement last Friday. Ripple operates a network of digital screens in 650 locations around the U.S. reaching 8 million people. TargetCast is an agency providing brands with media strategy, planning, buying and performance tracking …

AgendiZe, the French company that enables 30+ Yellow Pages publishers to extend advertiser calls to action on dozens of online platforms, from e-mail to social networks, has raised $1.3 million in new funding led by Entrepreneur Venture, a French firm. The funding will be applied to the company’s international expansion, including a new office in …

Home owners associations would seem like natural publishers of hyperlocal news and information — especially where “many residents’ sense of community rarely extends beyond their own subdivisions, neighborhood schools and the crime and traffic problems closest to their homes,” as The Washington Post noted last week in an article on the failure of country-wide hyperlocal …

Many of us will be attending and running BIA/Kelsey’s Directional Media Strategies conference this week in Orlando. Stay tuned for blog posts and tweets from the show. If you don’t follow us on Twitter already, you can do so — @thekelseygroup. If you plan on being there, tag your tweets with #DMS09. Also send us …

Today at EADP, I had the privilege of participating on an analyst panel with Peter Buxton, Jesper Simonsen and Jim Easton. The panel, moderated by Kimberli Lewis and Michael Oschmann, was a lively discussion of global trends in the directory industry.
I argued that in order for the industry to succeed in the next decade (yes, …

This morning at EADP,  European Directories (EDSA) CEO Cornel Riklin outlined the company’s strategy to be the top provider of lead generation to SMBs in its markets. The path to get there includes offering leading local search platforms to consumers.
EDSA generated nearly 850 million euros in the last reported annual cycle and delivered 285 million …

Clemens Riedl, CMO of VZnet, Germany’s largest social network (yes, larger than Facebook across all age segments) spoke at EADP today about the ups and downs of holding that market position.
The site counts 15 million unique visitors, with 80 percent active at least once per month and 40 percent active daily. Its core audience includes …

Following up on yesterday’s post, days two and three from Prague continued with the march of thought-provoking presentations. Among them was Centrum Holdings, a Warburg Pincus-backed company that’s one of the few pure-play digital entities in Czech Republic and Croatia. It generated 35 million euros in the most recent year against a monthly unique audience …

Local media companies have been experimenting with different models for hyperlocal. Some are publishing their own blogs; others are building relationships with specific bloggers. Others are partnering with aggregator sources.
The New York Post has chosen the latter path, having formed a relationship with Outside.in, which has developed a specific “Outside.in for Publishers” program. The …

Yellow Pages Group Canada announced today that it has released a new version of its popular iPhone app, including a new interface and, most notably, video. Other features (some existing) include:
- Full access to merchant content, including video and photo montages
- Business, person and reverse phone number lookup
- Save to your favourites (My Favs) and/or …

BT Business is taking on search upstarts such as ReachLocal U.K. by launching BT SearchSmart. The service will provide a full range of search services for £74.99 per month ($123.30). There is an additional £100 setup fee ($164.42).
Developed in partnership with Latitude Group, a large U.K. search agency, BT SearchSmart will include a phone consultation, …

Day 1 of the European Association of Directory and Database Publishers Congress being held in Prague, Czech Republic, was squarely focused on the pending and necessary notion of transformation. The congress was kicked off by EADP President and Mediatel CEO Kimberli Lewis. Lewis, no stranger to the industry, put forth a compelling argument that directory …

It doesn’t make much sense on the surface and is something of a head scratcher. But Adobe has agreed to acquire Omniture for $1.8 billion. The acquisition is described as an effort to jump-start Adobe’s Web site development and service efforts by linking it with Omniture’s analytics. Adobe’s Creative Suite includes Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash.
From …