AT&T released its full-year 2009 earnings today, and its Advertising Solutions unit, which includes print Yellow Pages and Yellowpages.com, posted total revenues of US$4.8 billion, a 12.6 percent decline.
AT&T online directories unit Yellowpages.com grew 12.7 percent in Q4, compared with Q3 growth of 20.7 percent. Total online revenues for the year were US$884 million, which …

Saw this article today – more evidence that residential White Pages are verging on extinction.
AT&T has gotten the nod from Ohio’s utility regulators to eliminate White Pages from co-bound White/Yellow phone books. First, stand-alone residential White Pages books will go (many have already), then co-bound residential listings. White Pages, particularly residential White, is a cost center that …

Local Insight Media announced today that its subsidiary The Berry Co. (formerly an AT&T property) will expand its reseller agreement with AT&T’s Yellowpages.com. Under the new terms, the number of markets in which Berry reps will carry YPC in the sales bag grows from roughly 500 to 820, covering 34 states.
Berry reps will be authorized …

Interactive television once vied with the Internet (and dedicated online services) as the best conduit for interactive content. That fell by the wayside in the mid-1990s.
Today, ITV solutions are largely limited to simpler Internet-like apps like photo collections, Yellow Pages search, customized weather, real estate and auto search, games and electronic program guides. Almost all …

In a significant move, AT&T Interactive and Idearc Media announced today that they will extend each other’s reach by allowing business profiles on one site to be distributed on the other.

Here is a quote from the press release:
“Cross distribution of advertisers across YELLOWPAGES.COM and SUPERPAGES.COM creates even greater value for each company’s advertisers,” said David …

AT&T Interactive, the new division that’s behind the company’s popular YPMobile iPhone application, has added a voice search app to its roster. Called Speak4It, the application allows users to speak local search commands into the phone to receive map-based search results of nearby businesses.
The app currently doesn’t have much AT&T branding and could therefore be …

AT&T Advertising Solutions has announced a partnership with Hispanic publisher Seccion Amarilla to sell Hispanic advertising into select Seccion Amarilla directories.
“AT&T is always focused on enhancing our directories to best serve our business and residential customers in the diverse communities we serve,” Carlos Salinas, executive director of strategy and business development at AT&T Advertising Solutions, …

The Kelsey Group has learned that effective Nov. 1, AT&T Advertising & Publishing will become AT&T Advertising Solutions. But there is more to this than a cosmetic name change. AT&T has also reorganized the company and expanded its portfolio to make AT&T AS the primary channel for ad sales throughout the AT&T enterprise.
Under the new …

The Wall Street Journal reports on AT&T’s announced management restructuring today that puts wireless division chief Ralph de la Vega in charge of a broader consumer markets division. This division will encompass television (U-verse), telephone, wireless and broadband services.
This seems in part like a move toward a more unified bundle of products, and the eventual …

Zvents, which is seeking to transform the events category to a broader “what, when and where” category that encompasses local entertainment, organizations and businesses, has announced $24 million in new funding from AT&T (i.e., wireless and Yellow Pages), Nokia Growth Capital and NAVTEQ.
The funding is on top of $7.2 million previously raised from Vantage Point …

AT&T Advertising & Publishing CMO Ken Ray, speaking on a panel at Kelsey’s DMS ’08 event this week in Atlanta, said print books have plenty of life in them but that publishers have got to work to make them relevant with “URLs, e-mail, texting … using cellphones as a transactional device … a whole set …

President and CEO Frank Jules, who has held the top slot at AT&T Advertising & Publishing for a year, laid out a prescription for Yellow Pages growth during a keynote at Kelsey’s Directional Media Strategies conference in Atlanta, noting at the top that his business is “changing dramatically.” Jules’ prescription is heavily dependent on the success …

IBegin head Ahmed Farooq is shaking things up by publicizing Google’s take on top IYPs. Per Google’s methodology, Citysearch leads the way with 7.4 million uniques and a 3.2 percent reach. It beats Yellowpages.com with 6.8 million uniques, and Superpages.com with 6.2 million uniques. Next up are Yelp with 4.6 million uniques and Local.com with …

Frank Jules believes there is a clear shift from print to online taking place. And the best way for publishers to make a successful transition is to move from selling individual products to selling a bundle of products based on the number of calls or leads they can be expected to deliver.
As president and CEO …

One of the hard and fast truths about print Yellow Pages advertising is that the ads at the front of the heading almost always generate more calls and leads compared with those further back. The current trend is for small-business advertisers to move some or all of their directional media budgets from print to online believing …

AT&T Advertising & Publishing saw a 3.3 percent first-half revenue decline, to US$2.82 billion. Part of the decline reflects the sale of the L.M. Berry operation to Local Insight Media, and the resulting lost revenues. That deal closed early in the second quarter. AT&T reported that its Yellowpages.com revenues grew 40.2 percent in the second quarter, …

“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 …

Charles Stubbs has left his position as president of Yellowpages.com (a unit of AT&T) to become CEO of Atlanta-based Primedia, which publishes a variety of print and online vertical consumer guides, including Apartment Guide and New Home Guide, ApartmentGuide.com, NewHomeGuide.com and Rentals.com.
He is being replaced by David Krantz, who is currently AT&T’s vice president of …

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 …

The current distribution of the AT&T’s Real Yellow Pages produced by Dex (R.H. Donnelley) will no longer include the Chicago Metro Residential White Pages.
According to the release:
“Local residential listings are already included in the Chicago Neighborhood directories that we deliver in August, on DexKnows.com(TM) and on YELLOWPAGES.COM, so we felt it was better …