BIA/Kelsey President Neal Polachek and SVP Matt Booth kicked off the ILM:09 conference by presenting BIA/Kelsey’s local revenue forecast and the state of interactive local media. The bottom line is that they continue to predict that local media will fall from $155.3 billion in 2008 to $144.4 billion in 2014, a CAGR of -1.4 percent.
They believe …

Kenshoo Search is the third-generation end-to-end search marketing platform that was “built utilizing the quality management approach.” Its USP is to enable marketers to optimize every aspect of their campaigns to achieve maximum ROI. At ILM:09, Sivan Metzger announced the formation of Kenshoo Local, an initiative for which he is the general manager. “SEM is …

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 …

Here is a valuable marketing lesson for Yellow Pages, newspapers and broadcasters.
You probably remember Victor Kiam’s famous commercials for Remington shavers from 1979 when he said on camera, “I liked the shaver so much, I bought the company.” It got your attention because here was a guy who was putting everything on the line for …

My colleague Michael Boland released a new Advisory today on The Kelsey Group forecast for Western Europe mobile search and display. The bottom line is that TKG analysts forecast mobile search ad revenues will grow at a compound annual growth rate of more than 125 percent with display ad revenues anticipated to increase by a CAGR exceeding 138 …

In today’s eMarketer, the first story is titled “Interactive Marketers Lean on Search.” The item reports that “digital advertising has been the bright spot in many ad spending forecasts, and that trend is slated to continue.” The basis for the report is an interactive marketing forecast by Forrester Research, which predicted in a recent blog …

Today is Herb Gordon’s last day as a consultant to the Association of Directory Marketing, Inc., although he will continue to edit ADM Flash. Flash, the newsletter of the ADM, is sent to more than 1,500 people, and its stories, factoids and tidbits provide direction to those of us in the Yellow Pages industry. …

Don’t take The Kelsey Group’s word for the fact that more marketers are switching some of their advertising dollars into the Internet. Here’s what eMarketer wrote a week ago. “In the wake of the global economic downturn, marketers worldwide are shifting more of their budgets into cheaper, more-measurable categories.” The fact that eMarketer actually put …

Recently the company that delivers Idearc Yellow Pages in the Princeton, NJ, area brought our office a few copies of the most recent edition. I imagine that most people do what I did when the book came, which was to check to make sure both my residential and business listings were in the directory. (They …

The New York Times publishes separate sports and business sections on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. It may soon move away from separate sections altogether. This past Saturday, there was not a single display ad in either the sports or the news sections of the paper. There was less than a quarter page of classified advertising.

When I went to work in the new Information Services Division of Dow Jones in 1980, I was taken on a tour of the newsroom including the area where the news wires spit out a continuous flow of information called the broad tape. I remember being told that the first responsibility a reporter had was …

At the end of the second day of Marketplaces 2009, my colleague Matt Booth made a statement and then asked a follow-up question. He said, “most of what I’ve been hearing from the podium is optimistic. Don’t people realize that this is a challenging business environment? Is this optimism my imagination, or is it real?” …

Earlier this week I went to hear an economist offer his take on the current economy and how soon it would recover. Long story short, I believe the speaker, who had outstanding credentials, was overly optimistic. (I really believe he may have been on vacation on some secluded island for the past year.) In fact, his …

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article titled, “Hotels Say, We’re Businesses, Too.” The article points out that “under the rules of the Government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program companies are required to adopt policies on spending, private jets, events and conferences and office parties.” This is having a disastrous impact on many destination cities. For …

In 1996, one of our keynote speakers at a Kelsey conference was Greg Riker, who was vice president of technology at Microsoft and responsible for “wearable technologies.” A lot of what he did sounded like science fiction, but what he was testing has now become part of our daily lives.
In that vein, every year …

France Telecom is finally pulling the plug on the 26-year-old Minitel service, which it launched in France in 1982. (Actually, Minitel is really 15 years older than that according to SEC filings: “Under an advertising sales agreement entered into in 1967, France Telecom granted PagesJaunes exclusive rights to canvas and collate the advertising to be incorporated …

One of the most challenging aspects of speaking to the geodomain industry was the diverse backgrounds of the people in the industry. They come from media companies, technology firms, the music industry and the real estate business. What they have in common is a strong competitive streak (not unusual in entrepreneurs) and an incredible desire to …

 
The headlines from this week’s edition: 
GE: The Heat on Immelt  
Google: Weathering the Storm? 
The Future of Fannie and Freddie 
Anheuser-Busch’s Troubled Brew 
This wedding tradition of something old and something new is appropriate for BusinessWeek’s leading online stories this week. GE is the something old, Google is the something new … you get it. The remainder of the saying …

At Princeton’s Fourth of July fireworks last night, I got into a discussion with a friend who is concerned about his son who works as a journalist for a small N.J. newspaper. I referred him to a “tell it like it is” story in Search Engine Watch by Kevin Heisler under the foreboding headline “Newspapers Bleed Red …

“Extraordinary change means extraordinary opportunity,” Merrill Brown, founder and principal of MMB Media, told the audience at last month’s Drilling Down on Local conference. Few people are more knowledgeable about the impact of new technologies on society than Brown. Before he was a founder of RealOne, before he was the first editor in chief of …