I had the opportunity to speak with Brad Reynolds, CEO of Mongoose Metrics, a Cleveland, Ohio-based call measurement and conversion analytics company. Reynolds was quick to point out that it is not simply a call tracking company, but rather it is dedicated to linking online and offline conversion so clients can better understand what leads to sales conversions. According to Reynolds, “Our business is based around illuminating the sales funnel related to offline conversions. Our goal is to make it easy to track online and offline conversions side-by-side. We want to drive actions like tweaking marketing spend and efforts with a full basket of information.”

While some companies focus entirely on online conversions, the reality, according to Mongoose Metrics, is that a large majority of transactions occur offline via the phone. In most cases there is a chain of events that lead to an offline conversion. By better understanding how online and offline media influence the conversion path, marketers have a better sense of what media and messages they should be using to maximize their effectiveness. With good offline and online conversion data in hand, brands can personalize their messages across media to create a conversation and a stronger relationship.

Mongoose Metrics has also been busy putting together an effective international local number tracking network and recently put together deals in Canada and the U.K. to deliver true local exchange numbers across both countries. Rather than relying on VoIP numbers or toll-free numbers, Mongoose is now able to offer local telephone numbers better linking businesses to their local area. “Until recently, it had been nearly impossible for Canadian and U.K. companies to use local phone numbers to follow visitors from Web-to-phone to understand how their Web sites drive phone calls and ultimately sales,” according to Reynolds. Mongoose Metrics’ move into the U.K. and Canada is a first step in expanding internationally.

When asked where call measurement is headed in the near term, Reynolds quickly pointed to mobile. “While many feel there will be transactions handled on the handset, the current reality is that most sites are not fully enabled for mobile screens, requiring too many clicks and too much scrolling. People want to get a quick answer to their question and often will revert to contacting the store or company since it is easier — and they have a phone in their hand to expedite the need for information. Click-to-call features makes sense on the mobile Web and will offer yet another layer in understanding where offline conversions are initiated.”

When asked about other developments, Reynolds replied, “Mongoose is currently working on a few proprietary products to provide deeper analytics of incoming calls and hopes to create a way to trigger specific actions tied to a recognized set of keywords. This is yet another step Mongoose is taking to help drive conversions and personalize the communication between consumers and advertisers.”

While retailers are reducing their brand advertising, along with store inventory and head count at their headquarters and stores, promotions, local events and direct marketing efforts are getting a big boost, says TNS Retail Forward Executive VP Dan Stenik, who was speaking at the NAA Annual Convention in San Diego.

Quoting an ancient Chinese proverb, Stenik says “there is an opportunity riding on dangerous winds.” The wildest opportunities may be with specialty stores inside malls, who have been forced to boost their own marketing as the malls themselves lose favor. But they’re going to have a hard time.

More ready opportunities might be with retailers that are in tune with the depressed times, which have brought in a mood of “conscious consumption” rather than “conspicuous consumption” (think green). “They equate frugality with morality,” says Stenik.

The new consumer is into responsible purchasing … things that are “unique, genuine and local,” he says. “They want good, safe sustainable foods. They want ‘limited editions,’ ‘insider information.’ ”

“Local is a luxury,” adds Stenik. “It is not common. The relevance today is in ‘value, values, and being valued.’ ”

Whole Foods, for instance, is state-of-the-art in driving the value of local. The new Venice, California, location has local produce, assortments, a chocolate island, artists, jewelers and designers selling goods inside the store. They have also commissioned murals from a local (and world-renowned) artist.

“Their focus is on the local shopper,” says Stenik. “The common denominator is on ‘relationships,’ ‘trusts’ and ‘collaboration.’ ”

Another hot trend in retail are “pop up” stores like The Bullseye Bodega from the likes of Target and TJ Maxx, which are selling their private-label goods in temporary locations, often around the holidays. “These stores need to centralize and process a lot of advertising over a few weeks,” notes Stenik.

Given these trends, consumer electronics and appliance stores, apparel and shoe stores, drug stores, building/hardware stores and supermarkets ought to do the best in the next couple of years. Home furnishing stores, furniture stores, discount department stores and department stores will have a harder time.

The successful companies will be those that sell lifestyle items that make living fun. Not the products themselves,” says Stenik. “You see retailers getting in to services … drug stores and supermarkets with in-store health clinics. They are building their entire business around it.”

AdAge’s Bob Garfield famously sketched out a “chaos scenario” in which the media/advertising infrastructure collapses, venerable media brands fold bad poker hands and feral cats carry off small children.

This week, Garfield says it is all actually happening because of fragmentation, a shift to consumer control and hard economics. “Media and advertising today amount to a failed state,” writes Garfield. “Not merely noisy, corrupt and dangerous like, say Pakistan. Think Somalia in the mid 90s…’Black Rock Down.’ ”

But is it hopeless? Digital can come to the rescue, says Upstream Group consultant Doug Weaver, in this week’s excellent edition of his newsletter, The Drift. For starters, Weaver advises one and all to get out of “the transportation business.” “The future is about connecting and engaging consumers where they are, not where we wish they were.”

Weaver also suggests we should look at “no more stars, only galaxies. We’ve got to get over our site-centric view of the world,” he says. “Even the best content and community creator should be fixed on distribution and network building. Pay attention to the ‘net’ part of Internet.”

As for “Church and State,” Weaver says “Welcome to Theocracy. “Everything is integrated. Everything.”

And finally, Weaver tells us to “ stop worshiping at the altar of advertising. We’ve created an ‘advertising class.’ that is now two generations removed from the business of really selling stuff and serving consumers.

“For too long, we have treated the manufacturer/marketer — the producer and seller of goods and services — as an ATM to finance our insular, sexy little business. We all need to resign from that business today,” says Weaver. While “the easy money has vanished, the long term creation of real value has just begun.”

The phone is quickly advancing as a means of pushing out ad-sponsored content that mimics some of the popular mobile advertising features.

Greg Webster of VoodooVox, at ILM:08, debuted some of the new features of the company’s In-Call Media group, demonstrating additional marketing opportunities via on-hold messages, “pre-call” messages when using calling cards, and distribution over a network of telephone audio outlets such as 1-800-FREE-411, radio stations and major call centers. Many of the major functions include sending information to your mobile phone and being able to push a button to get extended information beyond a typical :09 message now utilized on the network. The ICM interface allows advertisers to set up their own campaign, direct it to specific states and even defined DMAs.

Two case studies clearly showed the power of this emerging media. One study involved the promotion of an event aimed at Hispanics by Food4Less, which utilized “pre-call” messages on calling cards used in identified Hispanic communities. The net result of this campaign was a 40 percent increase in awareness, a 15 percent increase in attendance and a 35 percent increase in new customers. Another approach used by Buena Vista International targeted radio station on-hold messages to promote a limited release movie aimed at teen girls.  The real aim of this new media approach is to take advantage of lost sales opportunities while customers are on hold with messages that are more relevant and appealing rather than simply playing “Muskrat Love” or “your call is important to us.” Much like mobile phone advertising, in-call media aims to provide a more intimate connection with customers to drive specific actions or to raise awareness. 

Today at the Canadian Marketing Association’s Digital Digital Marketing Conference, there was quite a bit of buzz around Blyk, a Finnish mobile phone company with an interesting hybrid model for distribution.

Blyk is a free mobile operator targeting young people (ages 16 to 24) and funded by advertising. Brands pay Blyk to help them reach their target audiences while users get interesting messages, cool stuff, free texts and voice minutes. Users receive six SMS/MMS per day in exchange for 217 texts and 43 minutes of voice calls each month.  Accounts can be topped up once the free usage runs out with standard mobile usage fees.

The company was founded in 2006 by former president of Nokia phones Pekka Ala-Pietilä and award-winning film producer Antti Öhrling. Blyk entered the U.K. in mid-2007 and by April 2008 had already reached more than 100,000 members. The company plans to go pan-European in 2009 potentially reaching 40 million young consumers.

A couple of presentations touched on some interesting case studies that gave national marketers some compelling reasons to look twice at this emerging mobile platform.  Executions ranging from straight promotion to previews on ads before they air on TV and books before they’re released show the broad utility of this type of opt-in platform. The level of engagement gained through the transparent relationship between Blyk and its users creates a number of opportunities for advertisers to gain valuable insight into the elusive 16- to 24-year-old market.

From an affinity and subcategory targeting standpoint, the model is unique in its depth and breadth. New members go through a lengthy registration process that includes a detailed questionnaire. The objective is to create highly relevant matches with potential advertisers to create an optimal user experience. The transparency of the interaction is what drives the users to share more personal data than even social networks are able to get a grip on.

One presentation showed some interesting McKinsey research that indicated a 26 percent lift in mobile advertising acceptance among consumers if there was a reward attached to it. For cash-strapped 16- to 24-year-olds, it’s known that a phone registers highly in the reward category. In a case study presented by Janet Kestin, co-chief creative officer at Ogilvy & Mather, a community of Blyk users were asked if they were OK with the advertising in exchange for phone usage. Seventy-one percent of those users responded that they were “cool” with it as long as it was relevant to their lives.

Big national brands like Boots, Penguin Publishing and L’Oreal that have experimented with the platform have seen tremendous results with average clickthrough rates of 29 percent (ranges between 12 percent and 43 percent). Not bad, since the mobile advertising average clickthrough rate hovers around 3 percent to 6 percent.

Blyk is a great example of a phone company that is thinking like a media company. Check this link for some innovative campaigns that have already been executed on Blyk’s network. Some of them clearly demonstrate how this platform could turn up serious volume and innovation on mobile marketing.

With the addition of coupons and GPS targeting, a whole new opt-in local media channel targeting 16- to 24-year-olds emerges.

Jim Hail, president and chief operating officer of Hagadone Directories and chairman of the Association of Directory Publishers, outlined what he believes has been a systematic decline in the brand value of the Yellow Pages at this year’s ADP Mid-Year Convention in San Antonio.

Prior to the break-up of AT&T there was strong support for promoting the Yellow Pages category via the industry’s “Let Your Fingers Do The Walking” campaign. “After the break-up, the incumbents and the Yellow Pages Association stopped promoting the category in favor of the incumbent publishers promoting their own brands,” said Hail. The reason given for walking away from an industry campaign has often been attributed to the incumbents, which said doing so would essentially be funding and helping the other publishers.

Not pulling any punches, Hail said, “The industry, mainly the incumbents, have let the brand become tarnished with little effort to help build back the industry, and this has put everyone in the Yellow Pages at risk. We will continue to work with and push YPA and the incumbent publishers to reconsider this position.” 

While independent publishers’ revenue share and usage share have continued to increase, their ability to affect the industry as a whole has been hindered since they are often overshadowed by the financial challenges of the incumbent publishers, which are more globally recognized and often control the perception of the industry.

The reality is that both ADP and the Yellow Pages Association need to work together to find common solutions to revitalize the brand and deal with the bad PR. Given the current challenges a coordinated effort would seem to have a stronger impact.

Hail concluded by saying, “No matter if you are a large incumbent publisher or an independent publisher, we need to have a common voice to help level the playing field in the local media space.”

In an opening session of the Association of Directory Publishers‘ 2008 Mid-Year Convention in San Antonio, YP Talk Publisher Ken Clark gave a close-up view of how negative PR in print and online is eroding the perception of the Yellow Pages industry. Describing these sites as “slowly chewing away the credibility of the industry,” Clark described them as “paper termites who are slowly eating away at the industry’s credibility with murky research, hearsay and the replication of misinformation.”

Over the past 12 months, the level of bad press has far outweighed the good press on what Yellow Pages companies have done. Recent coverage on TheDeets.com and Tracy Coenen’s “Top 25 Things Disappearing from America” are just a few highlights of the impact bloggers can have on the reputation of the industry when they place themselves in the role of majority thinkers on U.S. print Yellow Pages.

According to Clark, this altered perception of the industry is creating a credit crunch in the financial market and the misconception that the product is rubbish, a danger to the environment, a yellow supporter or a smart green consumer. The question is, what if anything is the industry doing to correct this or take the lead in how it is being perceived? Clark set out a challenge for the ADP attendees to:

One of the things that dawned on me after listening to the many speakers at our recent DMS ’08 conference in Atlanta was that a fundamental aspect of the Yellow Pages business has been lost — exclusivity. During the days before the Internet and the massive sharing of data with Google, Yahoo and others, the content and data of the Yellow Pages were exclusive to the print directories or their online counterparts.

While U.S. publisher Internet Yellow Pages sites bemoan the fact that they do not enjoy healthy traffic levels, when we look to the new breed of local search players like Yellowbot, Yelp and Brownbook and listen to search platform developers like Exalead, they clearly understand the value of exclusivity. The online world, and certainly local media in general, is driven by information and particularly uniquely aggregated information. The power local search sites hold is in the amount of aggregated data they have either uniquely developed or have aggregated into a convenient package for site visitors. IYPs remain in a position to become the end all and be all of aggregated local business and service information, but the window of opportunity is quickly closing due to the efforts of Google, Yahoo and a variety of aggressive local search sites.

With the vast amount of local company data that is continuously updated and enhanced each year, directory companies own a gold mine of local information that companies like Google, Yahoo and local search sites covet — which is why they continue to strike deals to gain access to this information. Collecting and updating local business and service data is an expense that search engines and local search players are not willing to pay. Pick any vertical and you can bet that in most cases the Yellow Pages database has more business listings and content than any other source. 

European players have understood this advantage and have shared far less with the search engines and vertical sites. They have enjoyed more organic traffic levels because of their cautious nature, desire to keep the deepest local content exclusively within their IYP sites and willingness to promote their brands. While some of their advantage lies in Europe’s more closed information sharing practices, publishers in Europe have made a decision to share less with search engines than their U.S. counterparts in order to build their brand.

The print Yellow Pages product has definitely lost its relevance worldwide to a large segment of its once loyal users. If the print book could again become a source of vital local information that was exclusive to its bound pages alone (not even to its IYP site), that would certainly build relevancy and a desire to use the product. The industry needs to get busy with the task of figuring out what demographic groups it wants to own, figuring out what content and user features those customers want in both print and online, and then implementing and heavily promoting those exclusive features and user benefits. These are the steps critical to winning new print and IYP users, enhancing the relevancy of the product line and increasing the ROI for advertisers.

Yellow Pages Group New Zealand has acquired a majority stake in grownups.co.nz,  a Web site targeting the over 50s crowd, as reported on Stuff.co.nz. Voted as New Zealand’s best lifestyle Web site in 2008, this acquisition may well prove to be a smart move for YPG-NZ. According to Blair Glubb, Yellow Pages Group’s digital marketing director, “… there were good benefits to be reaped from combining grownups.co.nz with Yellow Pages, which publishes the Retirement Guide. He said grownups.co.nz had loyal existing browsers and Yellow Pages reached more than a million New Zealanders per month. Over 1.2 million New Zealanders are in this age group and 65 per cent of them use the internet daily.” 

In a recent post, I covered the economic impact people in their 40s and 50s make based on TVLand’s Generation BUY survey. In my post I wrote, “With boomers in the sweet spot of Yellow Pages’ current usage, the value of this audience is being overlooked not only by investors and pundits, but by Yellow Page organizations as well.”  

While I can’t take credit for guiding YPG-NZ in this purchase, it none the less is an indication that publishers are waking up to the notion that the real value of the Yellow Pages lies in the demographic groups it attracts rather than in sheer distribution or access to its data. Actively engaging this key audience, which appears loyal to both the print and online YP products, is a solid strategic move that plays to YPG-NZ’s strengths.  

While investors and Yellow Pages pundits continue to bang the drum telling everyone that the “younger generation” isn’t using print Yellow Pages to the degree it should, and that without this younger demographic of users the book can’t deliver value to small and medium-sized businesses, they may in fact be ignoring the book’s greatest strength. The usage habits of 18- to 30-year-olds are of concern, but the reality is that this younger generation may not in fact be a significant contributor to the financial success of local SMBs.  

Are we saying the Internet generation with its desire for new technology and penchant for name-brand merchandise isn’t the main driver of the local economy? The simple answer is — not to the degree that most people and marketing organizations seem to think. The real controllers of spending and the influencers of spending are the baby boomers. 

According to the Generation BUY survey conducted by Viacom and TV Land: 

“Not only are 40 and 50 year-olds spending more on themselves per month than Millennials and Gen Xers but more interestingly they are spending twice as much as their younger cohorts on others in their lives. With so many people to shop for, Boomers are making several multi-generational purchase decisions at once and — contrary to common assumptions — they are far less brand loyal than Millennials and Gen Xers.”  

With boomers in the sweet spot of Yellow Pages’ current usage, the value of this audience is being overlooked not only by investors and pundits, but by Yellow Page organizations as well. The traditional sales message of Yellow Pages focuses primarily on the massive local audience the book delivers based on the total distribution of the book. So as fewer people keep the book, particularly younger Internet consumers, popular logic assumes it must be less influential and drive less value to local SMBs. However, when demographics are taken into consideration, the book is in fact drawing in the largest block of income and spending influencers in the market. As Larry W. Jones, president of TV Land, points out, “Knowing that this generation has so many dependants, the means to buy the products that appeal to them and the willingness to try new brands is powerful information to share … “  

Many boomers waited to have children and more often than not have teen children in their households, which significantly influences their spending habits. Add to this the fact that many boomers now also care for elderly parents and you can begin to see the influence this audience has in the local economy. 

“With the large amount of purchase decisions they are making for others spanning multiple generations, they are ‘Promiscuous Purchasers.’ The Generation BUY study found that people 40-59 spend more than three times the amount of money per month on spouses ($514) than adults under 40 ($169). Additionally, they spend nearly twice as much per month on kids ($295 vs. $158) and three times the amount per month on teen children ($494 vs. $136). With so many purchase decisions to make for the household, these ‘Promiscuous Purchasers’ are an important marketing sector even when they are not the prime target.”  

While educating and winning over the next generation of local shoppers is important, the Generation BUY study suggests that the Yellow Pages’ prime user continues to wield significant financial power in the local marketplace. Given this new supporting information, it would be prudent for Yellow Page marketers to focus their print marketing and R&D efforts with boomers as their main focus and the younger generation as their developmental audience rather than the other way around. Using demographics to market the print directory would focus even more of the sales conversation on the value and influence of the directory, further bolstering its position as a major local media vehicle delivering ready-to-buy customers who are also significant influencers of additional purchase considerations. While marketing to the Internet generation is popular and sexy, the smart marketer goes where the money is.