There is a tendency for speakers at a large conference to want to sell (they would say “educate”) the audience about their companies’ products and services. I know I’m guilty of it. Nevertheless, it is refreshing when a person making a presentation focuses exclusively on the session topic.

At The Kelsey Group’s Drilling Down on Local conference in Seattle, one of the two dozen sessions was titled “The Revolution in Classifieds.” Sarah Pate, president and CEO of  AdMission Corp., gave an excellent talk that provided her view of this issue. At the end of her comments, the audience knew little more about AdMission, but a lot more about the evolution of online classifieds and Pate’s perspective on the future.

In the beginning, classifieds were controlled by local print properties, and the first major disruption was the entrance of online aggregators such as AutoTrader.com. Pate went on to discuss the entrance of eBay with its online marketplace and Google, which signified that you no longer had to own the content to monetize it.

At every juncture, there was a response by the providers of print classifieds. That didn’t stop entrepreneurs such as Craigslist, analytics companies or social networking firms, all of which were taking market share from the legacy classified advertising providers.

Pate predicted that the evolution of classifieds would continue. There would be no more walled gardens. Content would be media rich, provide real value, and offer both relevancy and optimization. The conclusion, with which the other panelists concurred, is that while it is necessary to drive the consumer to the content, it is equally important to drive relevant content to targeted consumers.

The communications plan outlined by Neg Norton at the YPA convention last week is already paying dividends. Like most people in our industry, I have a Google Alert for the term “Yellow Pages.” The April 16 summary edition is shown below. All five of the Google News Alerts are positive. Three of the five Google Blog Alerts are favorable. 

If the industry can put together a consistent daily message about the value of print and Internet Yellow Pages and the good things the industry does in its communities, positive press will be generated. In our view, to be successful this requires coordination and cooperation between the three trade associations and all their members. This will be a challenge, but it will pay dividends on Main Street and Wall Street.  

Google News Alert for: “Yellow Pages” 

 
Search for tomorrow’s leaders begins now
Financial Post - Toronto,Ontario,Canada
The Yellow Pages Group is another example of a company that in recent years has honed its corporate culture and developed an employment brand most companies …
See all stories on this topic 

Community Newsroom: Community benefits from collaborative project 
Oshkosh Northwestern - Oshkosh,WI,USA
The new AT&T Yellow Pages phone directory just became a more valuable resource thanks to a collaborative project spearheaded by the Responsive Education for …
See all stories on this topic 

Yellow Pages hold photo contest 
York Daily Record - York,PA,USA
Photos must be of a York or Adams County scene and entrants must be current York County residents. The deadline for postmark or delivery is June 2. …
See all stories on this topic 

 
Brands must keep up with the times 
Adelaidenow - Australia
Another finding is that Google has become a more effective brand than Yellow Pages for the first time. This is reflected in the survey results that show …
See all stories on this topic 

AT&T YELLOWPAGES.COM and Call Genie Sign Content Access Agreement
TMCnet - USA
COM, an Internet Yellow Pages and local search directory and subsidiary of AT&T (News - Alert). Call Genie will deliver YELLOWPAGES. …
See all stories on this topic 

Google Blogs Alert for: “Yellow Pages” 

Advertising in the Yellow Pages and Video Yellow Pages
One way of improving sales for your product is to advertise in the yellow pages. Depending on your advertising budget, you have to choose the content and design of the product to be printed in such pa.
Latest Articles at Ad-Matrix - http://www.ad-matrix.net  

17.2 bln Yellow Pages searches in 2007
By AM
The Yellow Pages Association announced that 2007 Yellow Pages usage grew to 17.2 bln searches in 2007, up from 16.7 bln in 2006. Print usage remained stable with 13.4 bln print Yellow Pages references, unchanged from 2006, according to …
IT Facts - http://www.itfacts.biz/  

Yellow Pages Make Mary See Red
By lori 
Way too often,…two sometimes three big, thick telephone books [are] thrown onto the driveway or front porch….WHY? I don’t use them, don’t need them, didn’t ask for them, and don’t want them. I haven’t used a telephone book to look up a …
Texas Blue Lime Productions - http://texasbluelime.com/wp  

 
Traditional Media By The Numbers: Yellow Pages
By Tom Tsinas
I have Yellow Pages on Google alert and with the Yellow Pages annual conference titled “YP Industry Pledges Counteroffensive.” last week in Las Vegas, it’s no wonder my inbox was overflowing with stats, figures and opinions on its …
Search Engine People Blog - http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog  

Comment on Multiplatform Yellow Pages Usage On the Rise
By WebmasterT
The only way the numbers of offline references make sense is if they count my picking the Yellow Pages book up at my front door and putting it in the blue bin or the usage as a booster for small children and people of short stature. …
Sphinn: Comments - http://sphinn.com
 

Earlier this week, my colleague Charles Laughlin posted an entry about the beginning of the YPA annual conference titled “YP Industry Pledges Counteroffensive.” That headline pretty much captures what was an upbeat event that attracted 600 attendees. As YPA President Neg Norton told the industry, “the root of the problem is a belief that we are going away.” The fact is that both the print business and the electronic piece suggest otherwise.

Norton said that industry membership is 462 companies, a new record, with 57 new members in 2007. The YPA, along with the ADP, is working hard on environmental guidelines to educate people that “Yellow is green.” He went on to talk about the 90-day communications plan designed to help people understand the value story and other industry strengths. There are six key elements to this plan, which is still in development.

• Continue to meet with the financial news media
• Approach B and C counties to tell success stories that will bolster local business
• Release the metered ad study that will prove return on investment
• Complete a small-business omnibus survey
• Release the global usage study
• Get the industry’s message across through op-ed columns

Today, the YPA sent out a note inviting people to become friends of the Yellow Pages and receive an RSS feed so that we all have the facts and figures at our fingertips. Norton spoke about Yellow Pages as an industry in transformation where its members had a choice between managing the decline or investing in the future. One example of a company that had done the latter is Australia’s Sensis. In a presentation made by COO Carol Johnson and General Manager Jo Lynne Whiting, along with two of their sales colleagues, they made it clear that the customer is at the top of the pyramid for their $2 billion revenue business, which we calculate makes Sensis the sixth-largest directory company in the world. While the business declined 2.8 percent in ‘07, it is up 4.9 percent in ‘08, and Johnson indicated that she expects better results at year-end.

The Sensis team put together 10 revenue recommendations, which they followed religiously starting with the elimination of all discounts and the need to train, train, train the sales force to tell the value story. Initially, customers didn’t believe that they would not discount and some were angry. But Whiting said that after one year, customer satisfaction and value for the money are both up 12 percent, and employee satisfaction is +8 percent over last year. They praised the work done by Dennis Fromholzer, who they hired as a consultant to help them build information-rich ads that are the No. 1 usage driver.

Two of the most popular panels ran consecutively. Frank Jules, president and CEO of AT&T A&P, gave his first speech at a Yellow Pages event and made it clear that AT&T, like Sensis, is investing resources, distribution and advertising in its largest markets. The company purchased Ingenio, a pay-for-performance corporation, and is offering new products like video ads, Hispanic directories and gatefolds. Video was the highlight of another highly rated panel that followed. Moderated by the CMO of Newsforce, Dana Todd, the focus was on new mobile and video tools and how adoption drives usage and usage in turn drives adoption.

Finally, two significant industry awards were given out. Dorothy Talkington, senior VP of national at Ketchum, received the Stuart Stanze individual contribution award, and Denny Payne, former CEO of AT&T A&P and YPA chairman, received the YPA Lifetime Achievement Award. These two winners were the exclamation points on the Industry Excellence Awards, whose winners can be found on the YPA Web site.

The industry faces greater challenges than ever before, but it is refreshing to hear its leadership admit those and outline a plan that can help get the message out to the various Yellow Pages constituencies that this is still a very strong business. Never before has Yellow Pages faced economic uncertainty, a generational shift, environmental issues and a slow but certain transition from print to digital. We believe the industry is up to the challenge.

One of the most significant announcements in the past year about the Yellow Pages business was made by PagesJaunes. In order to get in front of the faster migration from print to online that is occurring in France’s major cities, the publisher reduced print advertising rates in Paris by 20 percent in 2008. Overall print directory revenues in France were essentially flat in 2007, while online service revenues grew 15.1 percent. This traces primarily to Pagesjaunes.fr, which averaged 10.7 million unique visitors per month in 2007, an increase of 22 percent, the sixth most visited site in France.

One notable figure here is that print Yellow Pages and White Pages together account for only about 61 percent of total PagesJaunes revenues in France. We expect print to increase in coming years due to an announcement that was made this week under the headline, “Lawyers are allowed to advertise in the Yellow Pages, says the French Supreme Court.”

From Advertising|France (Tues. 25/03/2008):

“In a judgment of 6 December 2007, the French legal Supreme Court (”Cour de Cassation”) has recognized the right for lawyers to advertise in the Yellow Pages. This has been done against the judgment of the Appeal Court from Bourges (second instance court) who had stated that “an advertisement in the Yellow Pages, be it on paper or on the Internet, was contrary to lawyers’ professional rules.

“The judgment of the Cour de Cassation paves the way for new possibilities for advertisements for regulated professions in the Yellow Pages.”

In the U.S., the attorney category accounted for 9 percent of publishers’ total print revenues in 2005. The opportunity for other “regulated professions” to begin advertising both in print and online offers PagesJaunes strong potential for growth. At the same time, the company anticipates its online share will continue to grow and projects that its margins will also be higher.

It appears that Yellow Pages in France continues to be a very healthy business. In the past two years, PagesJaunes’ number of total advertisers has grown 7.5 percent, and its retention rate is strong at 86 percent. PagesJaunes, like Yellow Pages Group and other Yellow Pages publishers, has shown that this can be a growth business.

As I noted in a blog about The Kelsey Group’s Local Online Media event in London last week, analysts, speakers and the audience were positively upbeat about the Yellow Pages business. The feeling by all was that the stock market has overreacted to some negative information about Yellow Pages. This has been exacerbated by bloggers and journalists, most of whom spend all day at their computers or on their Blackberries and wouldn’t want to admit doing something as old school as looking up a business in the printed Yellow Pages.

The Yellow Pages Association published its new 2007 usage data yesterday that says print directory usage was stable in 2007 and online directory references climbed 15 percent, so that overall there was a 3 percent increase in U.S. directory lookups. My guess is that the numbers are similar in other countries, only the online component most likely grew even faster than it did in the United States. As my colleague Charles Laughlin commented in his blog on the YPA numbers, “the fact that online is growing gives publishers a good story to tell, assuming advertisers, investors, the media and other audiences are receptive to the multi-channel argument.”

Cornel Riklin, CEO of European Directories, asked at our London conference what the industry can do to improve its perception among both advertisers and consumers. The Kelsey Group believes in the increasing importance of public relations, in particular press releases. SES London keynote speaker Fred Marckini, chief global search officer for Isobar, made the case that press releases will play an increasingly important role in the search world as video, social networking and the growth of universal search can make a story reach a huge number of people and have a long shelf life.

The worldwide Yellow Pages industry has a compelling value story to tell. But publishers won’t get that message across piecemeal — company by company, even country by country — in an increasingly global world. And they don’t have the money to do it in an advertising or promotional campaign. In my view, the solution is through an organized public relations effort that uses the growing power of universal search. The industry needs to revisit the concept of working together to put up a united front about the benefit to consumers and advertisers of print and Internet Yellow Pages.

This is not a complicated message. It can be done with leadership. The industry needs to counter the messages of journalists, bloggers and commentators who are too quick to dismiss Yellow Pages as a dinosaur based on little evidence beyond their own habits for finding information on local businesses.

As Charles Laughlin wrote, “Publishers can affect the outcome by investing in their products, maximizing their visibility and content and improving distribution.” In their own territories, Yellow Pages publishers should fight for every advertiser, encourage usage, and compete wherever and however necessary.

But the worldwide industry needs to use an old tool (public relations) in a new vehicle (next generation Web search) to reach a broad market. Otherwise, the false perception that revenue migration is moving from print to Internet overnight could become reality.

This is a serious and urgent issue. A unified offense is a better course than a disorganized (or nonexistent) defense. It is time for the global Yellow Pages industry to fight back.

Nearly 100 executives in The Kelsey Group community participated in a half-day session that we hosted in London titled Local Online Media. The panel I moderated was “The Financial Future of Directories and Local Search in Europe.” The panelists were Paul Gooden, equity analyst, ABN AMRO, and Paul Kuipers, director, media and telecom corporate finance, BNP Paribas. (As an investment banker, Paul has been involved in the KKR acquisition of PagesJaunes, the sale of TPI to Yell, as well as the Infote and European Directories transactions.)

I didn’t expect either the analyst or the banker to be all doom and gloom about the business, but I did not expect them to be as upbeat as they were either. Both felt the stock market has overreacted to a few pieces of negative information about Yellow Pages. They also believed that following the challenges of the debt market, we will see a resumption in Yellow Pages consolidation.

My colleagues Matt Booth and Charles Laughlin started the day with a number of slides from our new Annual Forecast “2007-2012: Outlook for Directional and Interactive Advertising.” One of the most important slides to our European audience is the following:

The Kelsey Group believes the total directional advertising (print and Internet Yellow Pages and local search) in Europe will grow from US$10.8 billion in 2007 to US$14.2 billion in 2012. Note that the print decline is a CAGR of only 1.2 percent, which is more than made up for in the very strong growth of both Internet Yellow Pages and local search. The obvious question is what companies will take this revenue?

In an executive interview at our London event, Andrew Day, CEO of Truvo (formerly World Directories), put it best: “Publishers need to see the new media upside as greater than the print media downside. Anyone who doesn’t believe that will fail.” In Europe, the urgency for action is even more imperative than in other parts of the world because Google’s share of the search market exceeds 90 percent.

The closing session discussed some of the themes of the day and came back again to the belief by the local search and Yellow Pages executives about the future of the business. From the audience Cornel Riklin, CEO of European Directories, asked what the industry can do to improve its perception among both advertisers and consumers. We will discuss this on Monday.

Not so many years ago, major Yellow Pages publishers in developed countries reported revenue and earnings growth (or occasionally declines) that were generally very consistent. The advent of serious competition in several markets has had somewhat of an impact on that consistency, and the increasing diversity of marketing and sales plans has also led to earnings diversity. In my view, the most important issue today is how publishers have balanced the need to maintain the strong profit margins that print has always provided while at the same time preparing for the tsunami of electronic information delivery. Adding to the management challenge is economic uncertainty that makes small businesses reluctant to spend money because they are afraid their expenditures won’t generate customers.

With that background, on Monday The Kelsey Group is hosting a half-day conference on Local Online Media in London. Europe is a diverse region consisting of nearly 50 countries, a little more than half of which are in the European Union. At the event, The Kelsey Group will be providing an overview of our forecast for directional media to include major European countries. It appears to us that several European markets are well positioned to grow their aggregate print, Internet Yellow Pages and local search business from 2007 to 2012. Our estimates are that Germany, France, Sweden and Finland will have the highest percentage increases, although none is expected to have print Yellow Pages expansion during this period. Their growth will come from digital products.

The chart above shows the penetration rate of businesses that advertise in the Yellow Pages (from GYP ‘07) and the percentage of the population that uses the Internet. The conclusion appears to be that neither is a significant reason for anticipated directional advertising growth. As we discussed in the first paragraph above, it seems clear that the single most important element of success is the management team. Increasingly leadership in revenue growth and profitability in directional advertising requires the sophisticated management skills of any evolving business.

Quick, what industry gets the highest customer service quality ratings from U.S. adult consumers, according to an August 2007 Harris Interactive poll? No. 1 is supermarkets with 92 percent giving them a good rating, No. 2 is online search engines (84 percent), and tied for No. 3 (78 percent) are computer hardware companies, hospitals and banks. My personal opinions are irrelevant, but I must admit that supermarkets would not have been at the top of my list. What is interesting to me is that 84 percent of respondents said search engines provide good customer service. This piece of wisdom came from eMarketer Daily, which ran a fascinating story on “Search Marketing’s 800-Pound Gorilla.” EMarketer is an expert on giving you enough information to make you hungry for more and then offering the whole report for a fee. In this case, Search Engine Marketing: User and Spending Trends is worth every dollar to anyone who is interested in the search engine business.

The author, David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer, writes:

“However, the term ‘customer service’ is likely used broadly here, since one would guess that the vast majority of people who have used a search engine have never actually spoken with or e-mailed the people running that engine. Most probably, these results imply that people like what they get from search sites.”

Imagine that. There’s no greeter at the front door, nobody to bag your purchases, not even a smile from a candy-striper or a teller. All you get is what you, yourself, are able to pull out of a search engine. I have never built a boat in a bottle, or even attacked a complicated crossword puzzle. But I have done a lot of searching, and when I find what I’m looking for, often on a local search, there is a great deal of satisfaction. In a blog tomorrow, I plan to see if there is any way to compare satisfaction of using a search engine with other ways of finding products and services, such as Yellow Pages or newspapers.

Mr. Hallerman’s article refers to the huge number of people in the U.S. alone who used search engines last year. It’s at least 155 million and that number will rise by 25 million in 2011. Search advertising spending continues to grow, even if it is at a slower percentage pace than in previous years simply because the absolute number is already high. As the chairman of a company that spends a fair amount of money on paid search marketing every year, a key issue to me has been whether I’m getting my money’s worth. People don’t report to us that they are coming to a Kelsey Group conference or buying a report because of a paid search or contextual ad. Forrester’s Research, according to this eMarketer report, would reinforce this. Fifty-nine percent of respondents say they don’t pay attention to search ads, and 36 percent don’t trust them. Meanwhile, eMarketer is predicting that U.S. search advertising spending will grow from $8.6 billion in 2007 to $16.6 billion in 2011.

Consumers are happy. That’s good. And advertisers are continuing to pump more money into search advertising, despite the fact that consumers report they’re not paying much attention to the advertising, or worse. Some of this is clearly the novelty effect and the fact that advertisers want to be on the leading edge. Still, the bottom line is return on investment. This suggests that at some point, perhaps sooner rather than later, Yellow Pages and other traditional media are going to look pretty good compared with some of the new media options.

A year ago, my colleagues Neal Polachek and Charles Laughlin predicted that Internet Yellow Pages as a percentage of total U.S. Yellow Pages revenues would climb from about 6 percent in 2006 to 24 percent in 2011. While the base is higher in most coutries outside the U.S., the trend is the same. The issue becomes whether the convenience and ubiquity of a print Yellow Pages directory will translate online. Even among diehard users of print directories, there is only so much space in a home or business that someone is willing to allot to a large book. The battle in print tends to be one of distribution; online the fight is for awareness, ease of use and the consumer experience.

Users who are seeking a product or service have a choice between print and online. If the choice is print, there generally are only a few places the consumer will go. On the other hand, if the decision is to search online, there are two dozen choices the user has every time he or she makes a local search.

Earlier this week, I called Pat Marshall, chief new media officer of Yellow Book, to discuss what Yellowbook.com is doing to position itself to claim market share in IYP. Marshall has been toiling in the IYP field since at least 1994 when he was creating and then running Superpages.com for GTE before the company became part of Verizon and now Idearc. He spoke eloquently and forcefully about the opportunities that are available to Yellowbook.com as it develops products that meet the needs of consumers, advertisers and corporate stakeholders. What was most encouraging to me was not so much the specific plans Marshall’s team is developing, although there certainly is an urgency to establish a position in the market. More importantly, Yell Group CEO John Condron has made a commitment to the corporation’s Internet activities in the U.S., the U.K. and Spain. This is backed up by “communication conduits” between the three parties that will facilitate growth in all three markets. 

At the end of the day, execution is critical to Yellowbook.com’s success, but Marshall has made it clear he has the backing of the corporation for needed implementation. 

Since at least 1997, when we gave a presentation at the YPA annual conference titled “Six Trends that Will Change the Yellow Pages Industry,” we have been making forecasts and predictions about our market coverage areas. Tomorrow the program directors and senior analysts responsible for our three businesses will once again make predictions for how they see their markets evolving over the next year.

Charles Laughlin, Kelsey Group senior vice president and Kelsey Report program director, provides an honest assessment of how he did last year. The predictions our analysts provide are not the same as forecasts, which will follow in a month or two. For instance, Charles will not talk about revenues, usage, percentage of local businesses moving to online advertising products; rather he will be looking at the bigger picture that provides our clients with the background and foundation of how we see the coverage areas evolving. This is a macro view, compared with the micro view clients will get from our forecasts.

As an avid sports fan, I always find it curious that sports experts are not only willing to pick the winner of a game, but its score as well. We’re not about to go that far because the environment that is painted by our predictions is too important to the livelihood of the people who work in our industries. Print and online Yellow Pages, local search, verticals, classifieds and e-commerce are all going through rapid transformation that will be informed by the flow of M&A money, high-level deal making and the decisions of owners to take risks. We encourage our clients to take the time to review our predictions and give us your feedback. These subjects will be discussed in detail throughout the year in our written materials, conferences and discussions with our analyst team.