U.K. directory publisher Yell has launched a new Web site designed to help agencies and media buyers evaluate its multichannel products. Yell additionally has dedicated a team of specialists to work directly with agencies. Large accounts are widely viewed as a channeling segment for Yellow Pages publishers, and more tools and resources need to be devoted to this segment to make a better case that the full suite of directory products offers good value to large, national accounts.

Here are some details from the press release:

Yell media are used over one billion times a year by 87% of the UK population* and deliver wide-reaching advertising opportunities for ever brand, media need and budget. A variety of packages spanning print, online and mobile are available with options including sponsored SMS, online banners, PPC keyword ads and classification sponsorship.

“We think this will become a vital agency resource,” said Jason Smith, head of advertiser development at Yell. “We know that over half of the people who contact a business through a Yell product go on to make a purchase.

Therefore our audience is ‘ready-to-buy’ which offers a huge opportunity for brands.”

The newly created team offers a fully managed service via a single dedicated point of contact, meaning consistency of approach and ease of communication. They will also offer a range of value-added services including consumer survey TGI, Mosaic profiling, mapping and response analysis.

Jason said: “The development of a bespoke portal and agency team is a natural step to provide the best possible service for media agencies to help them find the right Yell product that will give any brand great return on investment. This offers particular benefits to agencies with high-volume needs and further raises our profile among agencies and brands.”

Yell will be engaging directly with media agencies over the next few weeks and launching a B2B advertising and promotional campaign created by Proximity London to communicate fully the offer to the media planning and buying community.

Like Idearc Media earlier this week, R.H. Donnelley received a boost in its share price today after unveiling first-quarter results that showed market conditions are about as bad as expected, but not any worse. The company also unveiled a refinancing plan that will increase interest expense while also extending the maturing of much of its debt and gaining more flexible terms. The refinancing seems to have contributed to improved confidence in RHD’s stability.

The company also maintained a strong EBITDA margin in Q1 and announced plans to cut about US$30 million in costs, much of it in head count and other employee-related expenses.

The market seemed to like the results. As of 4 p.m. Eastern Time, RHD shares were up 28.5 percent to 8.20. Idearc shares are up almost 8 percent. Following its Q1 announcement, Idearc shares rose significantly and RHD enjoyed a bump as well. Today, the situation was reversed and RHD returned the favor, so to speak.

While it was a good day for the company’s share price, the outlook for ad sales painted by RHD CEO Dave Swanson was anything but rosy. The publisher reported total first-quarter revenues of US$674.7 million, a 2 percent increase over 2007. Ad sales, however, dropped 4.8 percent, which RHD executives pointed out was in line with 2008 guidance of mid-single-digit declines. The company confirmed its 2008 guidance on today’s call.

In describing the current environment, Swanson was very careful not to raise hopes that a recovery was on the horizon.

Responding to a question from an analyst, Swanson emphasized that he “has not seen anything that would indicate any positive turn to the North” in sales results. Asked specifically about Las Vegas, one of RHD’s key markets, Swanson described it as the worst business environment he has seen in his career. While Florida and Nevada remain the worst markets, the pain of a slowing economy is being felt across all 28 states RHD operates in, according to Swanson.

So RHD is making it clear that while the economy will keep results down for a while (and executives maintain the downturn is cyclical rather than secular), the company has taken measures, cost cutting and refinancing, that will improve the stability of the business. RHD is also working on a new version of DexKnows.com, which will go into beta later this year.

On the eve of today’s announcement, Deutsche Bank upgraded RHD from sell to hold, a boost that reflects a view that RHD is less risky as an investment than it was just a few weeks ago.

Perry Evans has a great post today on the opportunity and threat Yellow Pages publishers face from the verticalization of local search. We thank him for acknowledging TKG’s role in highlighting the emergence of vertical search at our Drilling Down on Local conference last week in Seattle.

In particular, Evans talks about the perilous position IYP operators are in as vertical content proliferates online. He also makes it clear that the publishers have assets to compete in verticals. Evans points out that Avvo may be positioned as a Yellow Pages killer (in the legal category anyway), but online Yellow Pages has the tools at hand to transform itself into an Avvo killer. Whether it does so is another matter.

This whole notion of how Yellow Pages companies can leverage the vertical opportunity will be on the agenda at The Kelsey Group’s Directory Driven Commerce conference, Sept. 15-17, in Atlanta. Check out our preliminary program.

At this writing, Idearc Media’s stock was trading higher (up about 28 percent at noon Eastern) after an earnings announcement that shows the company has managed its costs well enough to grow EBITDA, while its revenues continued to slide.

Here are a few highlights from today’s earnings call (we will have a more detailed write-up for clients of The Kelsey Report):

• Acting CEO Frank Gatto squarely blames the soft U.S. economy for continuing softness in ad sales. For the first quarter, “multi-product” ad sales were down 6.2 percent. On a reported basis, total revenues decreased 4.5 percent to US$770 million, with print declining 5.5 percent to US$696 million, and online up 7.4 percent to US$73 million.

• First-quarter EBITDA was up 1.4 percent on a reported basis, though it declined 3.2 percent on an adjusted pro forma basis. The adjusted EBITDA margin grew slightly to 47.7 percent. The company cited tight cost management and lower traffic acquisition costs (some of which were related to the end of its MSN relationship, which wrapped up in mid-December).

• The company blamed a shift from fixed fee to variably priced online advertising for the relatively anemic 7.4 percent first-quarter online growth rate. Idearc said it expects full-year online growth to be more in the 20 percent range. Idearc executives said demand is strong for performance-based advertising.

• The company is rolling out a new packaged search program called Search Marketing Local that will enhance the value proposition Idearc can offer local advertisers.

• Idearc executives adopted a friendlier tone toward the national sales channel on today’s call. Under former CEO Kathy Harless, the national channel was made something of a scapegoat for soft ad sales. Today, Idearc executives said national results had not improved from Q4 to Q1, but they added that the channel was working closely with Idearc and said they hoped to see results of this in the second half of the year.

• Idearc leaders acknowledged that stand-alone local online sales channels like ReachLocal are increasingly a factor, but they were confident they could compete because it offers a broader package that includes print, IYP, SEM and SEO.

Yellowbook has unveiled a new television ad campaign, replacing the kinda cheesy Kung Fu ads (sorry, David Carradine, you did what you could) with a much slicker campaign that focuses on promoting use of Yellowbook’s online directory (which is also sporting a new look and feel, modeled closely after its sister IYP Yell.com).

Yellowbook (a unit of the U.K. firm Yell Group) has also unveiled a more streamlined logo. It makes a lot of sense for the company to bring its overall design sensibilities up a notch if it hopes to remodel itself into a more platform-agnostic image. Its previous logo had seemed dated.

The new ads rely on the tried-and-true practice of setting up a somewhat amusing need for a business found under a common YP heading, then off to Yellowbook.com and the problem is solved, perhaps with a twist of irony. But this campaign marks a great leap forward in production quality from previous Yellowbook efforts. Here are two ads from the new campaign (the first doubles as a cautionary tale on lower back tattoos). Of course, Yellowbook isn’t delivering quite the Tom Cruise “Minority Report” experience that’s shown here. In fairness, the ads are supposed to be depicting the Yellow Pages of the future. 

The ads’ underlying theme of “finding what you are really looking for” is clever, since it underlines a key point of difference between IYP and search (at least for now), which is that Yellow Pages data are targeted and structured and designed to give consumers what they want with no extraneous material.  The ads were produced by Yellowbook’s new agency, Gotham Inc. (replacing Trahan Burden & Charles) and were shot by Vadim Perelman, director of the film “House of Sand and Fog.” I guess there is credibility, and then there is “I’ve directed Sir Ben Kingsley” credibility. 

Speaking this afternoon at at The Kelsey Group’s Drilling Down on Local conference in Seattle, Kurt Weinsheimer, GM for Local Marketing Services at Spot Runner, offered a simple set of rules for effectively selling to small businesses. 

• Target the right customers. 

• Keep it simple. Get the sales message through quickly and clearly. 

• Manage expectations. “You have got to tell them what to expect. If you do not manage expectations, they will set them for you. And I guarantee you won’t like what they expect.” 

• Do as you say, and say what you did. “If you say you will hit results, you better do it. Otherwise they will be gone. If you don’t let them know you did it, it didn’t happen.” 

Weinsheimer was speaking on the panel “The Local Resellers: Taking on Goliath.” His company helps small businesses create and distribute affordable television advertising. 

The panel explored how media resellers interact with small businesses and channel partners. Much of the discussion centered on how to effectively manage relationships with partners, including how to effectively manage customer expectations without direct control of the sales force. 

Carey Ransom, VP of business development at WebVisible, acknowledged this challenge. 

“Yes it is impossible. We do spend a lot of time working with our partners to make sure they understand. We talk about how to compensate salespeople so they care, that it is not about selling it and walking away.” 

WebVisible works with a wide range of channel partners, including newspapers and Yellow Pages publishers. 

A leading auto vertical and Google sat on stage together this morning and provided some insight into how they might coexist.

Cars.com President Mitch Golub made clear that sales and customer service will serve as an effective firewall that will prevent his operations from being disintermediated by Google.

“The challenge for Google is in the sales component,” Golub says. “Cars.com has 700 salespeople. You need that level of 24/7 customer service to build that business.”

Adrian Madland, head of automotive strategic partnerships at Google, insisted that the last thing his company wants to do is acquire 700 sales reps. Rather, Google is about enabling universal search, which requires depth of content across a wide swath of verticals in a variety of media (text, video and so on).

Paraphrasing the ads for BASF, Madland says: “We don’t do verticals, we make them better. We are all about universal search. We don’t want to own content, want to help people build great verticals and direct users to it.”

In a session called “The Online City: Close Up on Seattle” here at Drilling Down on Local, The Seattle Times’ Patricia Lee Smith reiterated a point made earlier by the LA Times’ Rob Barrett, which is that online newspapers cannot compete on technology. The only way for newspapers to carve out a unique position online is to leverage not just unique local content, but also unique local understanding. 

“We at the newspaper co have a uniquely local lens. we can’t compete in technology, but we offer a uniquely local perspective,” Smith says. “At any given time, people in two newsrooms in Seattle are asking what information matters most to people in this community.” 

Through NWsource.com, The Times has created a hyperlocal site that seeks to understand the local consumer, and combines professional and consumer-generated content. 

Smith told the audience that NWsource, while generating less traffic than The Times’ other online brands, produced three times the clickthrough rates as the main Seattle Times site, because of its relevant content that drives to the neighborhood level. 

Matt Berk from Marchex talked about how his company, which operates more than 150,000 local domains, described a much different approach to a similar objective, using content aggregation and sophisticated technology to build a very relevant experience for a consumer looking for information in Seattle. For example, Marchex has aggregated about 32,000 local business reviews in the Seattle area from a variety of content partners.  Berk acknowledged it is still early days in creating and monetizing the optimal hyperlocal experience. “We are at the beginning of learning what it means to target locally.”    

The Nordic directory publisher Eniro announced somewhat disappointing results for the first quarter, with weaker than expected print results not fully offset by online revenues. Eniro President and CEO Tomas Franzén noted that the first quarter is seasonally weak for its online business.

In 2007, Eniro generated 54 percent of its revenues from online. This year, Franzén says the business will generate a majority of its revenues from non-print sources.

Group wide, Eniro posted first-quarter revenues of SEK1.38 billion, a 2 percent decline over Q1 2007. Online grew 13 percent, while print was down 14 percent (that’s organically), led by an alarming 24 percent organic print decline in Norway, largely due to the publication of the Oslo Yellow Pages.

And some of the weak print results were made weaker by the publication of big city Yellow Pages directories (such as Gothenburg in Sweden and Oslo in Norway) and fewer of the better performing local directories. Online results in Denmark were made weaker as well by glitches in integrating the Kraks online directory operation acquired last year. Generally, the company expects print to decline at a lower rate and online to grow at a faster rate for the full year 2008, with online growth more than offsetting print declines.

One interesting revelation from the call was that in 2009, Eniro will switch to a smaller format print Yellow Pages directory in both Norway and Sweden as part of a broader program to try to stabilize declines in print Yellow Pages.

Truvo announced today that CEO Andrew Day will step down June 1 and assume the role of chairman, allowing current Truvo Belgium Managing Director Donat Retif to take over as CEO. Retif has been with Truvo since 2005. He previously served as vice president of sales for Idearc, working in both the United States and Canada. Before that, he worked briefly in the VNU Promedia operation, which later became Truvo Belgium.

Day has brought a strong focus on developing online revenues to Truvo, and has often said directory companies need to generate about 30 percent of revenues from online sources to have sustainable business. Day also oversaw the rebranding of the company from World Directories to Truvo.

Today, Truvo also announced its 2007 financial results. Overall the company (excluding the Netherlands operation, which is being sold to European Directories) grew revenues 3.4 percent to 388.3 million euros, driven by online revenue growth of 27.4 percent. Print revenues (again, excluding Netherlands) declined 1.7 percent. Online accounted for about 22 percent of 2007 revenues, getting closer to Day’s 30 percent objective.