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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

One of the many reasons the Internet has bloomed in the U.S. is that the administration, under the leadership of Ira Magaziner, former head of U.S. Internet policy, allowed the World Wide Web to grow without putting unnecessary restrictions on it. At a Kelsey Group conference on Interactive Newspapers in 1996, Esther Dyson, then the …

Jonathan Weber started his career in traditional media as a writer and editor at the Los Angeles Times, but the new media bug got hold of him. He was the cofounder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard, which more than any other publication reflected the rise and fall of the dot-com boom. In …

Executive Interview: The Leading Edge: Auto Advertising in Transition had very much the same ring to it as yesterday’s session on real estate in transition. At The Kelsey Group’s ILM:07 event, the final panel each day was on two of the most rapidly changing classified advertising verticals. Since home and automobile buying are typically the two …

Those were the words of a Network Communications Inc. CEO Daniel McCarthy as he announced that “we will have a deal with Zillow in the next 14 days.” McCarthy made this statement during an executive interview, The Leading Edge: Real Estate in Transition, at The Kelsey Group’s ILM:07 conference today. Other panelists in this session …

The circulation at the nation’s largest newspapers dropped again over the past six months by an average of 2.6 percent, according to the Newspaper Association of America. To try to fight the perception that newspapers are of less interest or value to consumers, the industry has decided to revise circulation numbers to include both online …

At the Directory Driven Commerce conference we held in 2006, the theme was “Adapting to a Shifting Marketplace.” In my opening remarks, I noted that Ford Motor Co. had been the second-largest automobile company in the world behind General Motors for 70 years. In September 2006, Ford’s chairman said that it would give up its …

On Friday, I had the opportunity to spend some valuable time with Richard Zurawski, president and GM of Telmetrics, a leader in the increasingly important call measurement business. As my colleague Charles Laughlin, program director of The Kelsey Report, said today, “In this highly competitive world, measured value is far more important than perceived value.”
Richard echoed …

 
I am not a New York City person anymore, in great measure because of the challenge of getting from one location to another. So when I do have to go to New York, I try to cover as much ground as I can. Recently I was able to arrange four meetings in the city on …

Name the three countries that ZenithOptimedia predicts will be the fastest-growing ad markets by percentage growth from 2006 to 2009. Not even your ad agency friends are likely to get that question right.
I have always taken umbrage with any company that forecasts global advertising expenditures by medium and leaves out Yellow Pages. However, this October report, according …

Two articles. Two perspectives. Two headlines.
Yesterday, Chris Smith wrote in Search Engine Land the following headline, “Google Trends: Yellow Pages Will Be Toast in Four Years.” He went on to back up his thesis using statistics. “My gut feeling is that the Google Trends graph for searching for ‘Yellow Pages’ is likely representative of a …