Tellier Talks About Trader Deal

Had a discussion this morning with Marc Tellier at Yellow Pages Group about his company’s acquisition of Trader Media Group, a Canadian classifieds publisher.

We will cover the whole idea of directories and classifieds in greater detail within the TKR program, but we’ll share a few highlights here.

Tellier sees the deal as very closely tied to Yellow Pages, since classifieds shares many characteristics. And he sees the deal as building on the assets he cares about, the YPG brand, content and customer relationships. All other things, he says only half jokingly, can be outsourced.
Here are some highlights of what we heard from Mr. Tellier:
* The Trader deal has a lot to do with YPG’s upcoming plans to launch keyword search, and in particular how it can enable brand search.
* YPG has a lot of ideas on how to merge directory and classifieds content into local vertical hybrids. Imagine a Trader publication with a vertical directory of related headings in the back pages.
* The deal gets YPG into the C2C business, something directory publishers have not been very successful at to date.