The New York Times juxtaposes conflicting views on the outlook for media spending and the recovery of the ad industry in “The Outlook is Murky for Media Advertising.”
On one side of the debate are analysts like UBS’ Matthieu Coppet, who thinks there will be a “relatively robust recovery in ad spending” beginning in 2010. On …

According to a new report from the multi-platform Australian directory, information and publishing giant Sensis, more than 95 percent of SMBs in Australia are connected to the Internet, and 57 percent have a business Web site. By the way, this compares with 62 percent of U.S. SMBs that report having a Web site, according to …

OK, I confess. I watched “30 Rock” last Thursday.
About midway through the program, I caught a 30-second spot for ServiceMagic. This was the first network TV spot I’ve seen for ServiceMagic (although once I started looking around online, I found other TV spots it has run). This particular spot is known as the “tale of …

LB2 Group announced the acquisition of Ketchum Directory Advertising from the ad agency behemoth Omnicom Group.
LB2 Group Directory Services (a member of the European Association of Directory Publishers) is an agency “specializing in international placement of Yellow Page advertisements and data base entries, brand control and awareness, and cross media conformity in a multi-lingual environment.” …

Local Insight Regatta Holdings announced the consolidation of its two principal operating subsidiaries, Local Insight Yellow Pages and The Berry Co. The consolidation was accomplished by merging Local Insight Yellow Pages, Inc. into The Berry Co. LLC.
The tagline for the updated brand is now “Your Local Leads Expert,” which was chosen to convey Berry’s range …

Neat article in today’s Wall Street Journal about spending on e-mail (and similar communication) for constituent outreach by members of the House of Representatives. The article says that in the first nine months of the fiscal year, members spent a total of $3.5 million on this.
A little math: Grossing up this figure to a simple …

In a June 2 article in The Wall Street Journal, summarizing interviews at the recent ‘D’ Conference in Carlsbad, CA, cable and media mogul John Malone talked to Walt Mossberg about monetization and pricing models in the new era of TV. (Oh, by the way, the word is now “video” — only older folks say …

Thought your online searching habits had settled into a predictable routine? Well, think again. We’re on the verge of another big upheaval in search technology and options.
Item: Google has put its new browser, Chrome, on the fast track to commercialization (officially out of beta this month). Among other things, Chrome is designed to run JavaScript …

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal, “Marketing Tools Stretch Ad Dollars,” exemplifies our thinking about the evolution of the ad market. The article details how Chrysler Corp. uses fresh data on the performance of its TV commercials to tweak them to be more effective. Ad performance is measured by traffic and activity on …

Good news on structural assistance for small business — two days in a row? Can this be?
Yesterday, I reported on the possible thawing in the secondary market for a popular type of SBA loans to SMBs. Today, the news, as reported by BusinessWeek, is that there has been new bipartisan legislation introduced into the Senate …

Small business has suffered at least as much as large business in the great credit crunch. Recently, however, there are signs of improvement specifically in the credit market for small business, as reported in today’s Wall Street Journal.
In the residential mortgage market (at least pre-crash), most mortgages originated by lenders were sold into the secondary …

I had the pleasure of attending an excellent mini-conference yesterday on Digital Media Thought Leadership. The organizers were the prolific “emerging technology connection” SDForum and the venerable VC firm Sierra Ventures. (The key commercial sponsor was the law firm Nixon Peabody LLP.)

The conference covered some of the most challenging and topical issues around the transition …

One of the disadvantages of being the “most respected analyst firm” is that other people (including otherwise knowledgeable pundits) are wont to misquote you, use your comments out of context, or simply draw erroneous conclusions.
Although we were flattered to see The Kelsey Group quoted in SunValleyOnline.com recently, about the fast rise of Web searches for …

I saw several more articles over the weekend on how small businesses are using social network sites like Facebook and MySpace for marketing.
This triggered a couple of thoughts…
There’s a whole a ‘shadow network’ of business marketers (B2C and B2B) thriving in many of the large, consumer-oriented social sites. Many of these are small businesses and …

As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, a new report by consultants Sageworks reports that amid the economic gloom, some industries are actually doing pretty well. These industries, with their sales growth rates for the past year, include accounting and tax services (up 10.9 percent); specialized freight haulers (up 6.8 percent); health practitioners other than …

A new study by AOL’s Platform-A and Information Resources, Inc. reports that nearly 40 percent of shoppers would be very likely to use coupons accessed online. Additional findings from this survey indicate that, not surprisingly, newspaper coupons are most popular with older demographics (more than 80 percent of consumers aged 55 and older clip newspaper …

The partnership between Yahoo and the Newspaper Consortium is an ambitious effort to bridge the gap between the online and print worlds. The two leaders of this partnership presented at the Interactive Local Media 2008 conference this morning, in a panel moderated by Peter Krasilovsky.
The panelists were Lem Lloyd, VP Newspaper Consortium at Yahoo, and …

The “New Takes on Local Audience Targeting” panel this morning at Interactive Local Media 2008 demonstrated how the technology for identifying and targeting audience segments is growing by leaps and bounds.
Moderator Bobbi Loy-Luster kicked off the session by introducing comScore’s Brian Jurutka, vice president of marketing solutions at comScore (who we congratulate on his recent …

My brother recently had a “vertical experience” in the Disneyland “Twilight Zone Tower of Terror.” A 150-foot drop in a rickety old elevator. Three times, in fact.
But Disney’s vertical engineering legerdemain is less ambitious than that of the diverse “vertical” providers who spoke at the “Building Online Vertical Experiences” panel this afternoon at Directional Media …

Sami Kassab, analyst on the European Media Research Team at Exane BNP Paribas, gave a data-laden, insightful perspective on the many of the world’s largest Yellow Pages publishers in “The Financial View” panel at Directional Media Strategies 2008.
Highlights of Kassab’s remarks (presented ticker style):
… Directory publishers have underperformed the broader media sector in both absolute and …