New research from Edison Media shows that television (broadcast, cable, satellite, premium) and the Internet are the most essential media to respondents' lives in 2007. Both radio and newspapers declined between the current survey and one conducted in 2002. According…
Universal McCann has been the definitive word in advertising forecasts for more years than most of us have been alive, and team leader Bob Coen has been consistently conservative yet accurate. In December, he predicted that Yellow Pages would come…
The Kelsey Group and AMR International joined forces to hold a summit in London on the Future of Local Search in Europe. It was an invitation-only affair, which is why you probably didn’t hear about it. Not surprisingly, most of…
A challenge that every marketing person faces is to determine the unique selling proposition (USP) for a product or service and then convey it in an interesting manner that will encourage the target market to buy. Today, after six months…
Directories 2.0 was the subject of this year’s annual European Association of Directory Publishers conference on Managing Directories. In 1996, EADP was the first directory trade association to recognize the importance of electronic directories and hold a conference focused specifically…
Ten years ago, The Kelsey Group was asked to make a general session presentation at the Yellow Pages Publishers Association annual convention. Although titled "Six Trends That Will Shape the Industry in the Year 2010," we chose instead to make…
For a variety of reasons, I am unable to attend this year's YPA Annual Convention in Las Vegas. The Kelsey Group is very well represented at this conference, just as we were at the Association of Directory Publishers event a…
Knowledge@Wharton published an article Wednesday that uses some Kelsey Group information. It's a mini case study titled "All Politics Is Local and So Are Sales Leads: The Birth of an Internet Search Company." The subject is a company called Natpal…
Last week, my colleague Peter Krasilovsky wrote a blog about 1-800-Free411 launching category search and took the opportunity to update how Jingle is doing. According to SVP Lyn Oakes, Jingle is receiving 16 million calls per month, with 60 percent…
It seems to me that precious little has been written about the fact that, according to the March 19 issue of eMarketer, four national portals Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and AOL have seen their share of total Internet advertising…
Our annual forecast was released today. The headline of the news release is "Global Ad Revenues for Print and Internet Yellow Pages and Local Search to Reach $38.9 Billion in 2011." The subhead is "Kelsey Group analysts expect continued growth…
Idearc held its coming-out party today. President and CEO Kathy Harless sounded positively giddy: "This is an exciting day for us. We're off to a strong start as a publicly traded company. We have an established, value-generating portfolio, a resilient…
It has been a month now. At the beginning of the year, as everyone who is reading this certainly knows, The Wall Street Journal reduced the width of the paper to save $18 million. My visceral reaction was negative, but…
Back in 1999, Microsoft sold a small business called Sidewalk because it didn't fit into its core software business at the time. In a lengthy story in Sunday's New York Times, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admitted: "but Sidewalk was really…
Yell.com, which calls itself the United Kingdom's local search engine, is working with Oodle.co.uk, a search engine for local classified advertisements, which will enable people who access Yell.com to post their own free advertisements on the site. While Yell is…
There is a marketing guy who is trying to build his business by telling people that the best way to get more golden eggs is to kill the goose that laid them. Larry Bodine's LawMarketing Blog recommends that lawyers do…
There are a lot of reasons why Yellow Pages will continue to be the dominant local advertising vehicle. Certainly a major benefit Yellow Pages publishers have is that advertisers and people looking to buy products and services both know a…
An executive at AT&T has informed me that an internal communication went out saying that BellSouth Advertising & Publishing President Ike Harris is leaving the corporation. Denny Payne, who has been president of SBC Directory Operations/AT&T Yellow Pages for the…
You have to wonder what AT&T is thinking. The lead article in The Wall Street Journal (sub req'd) Media & Marketing section on Friday was titled, "For AT&T, Ad-Sales Success Is No Cinch." No kidding. Essentially AT&T announced plans to…
The Kelsey Group's basic business has always been about the impact of new technologies on local media companies and small businesses. It is one thing to discuss this in the abstract and something else to read in The New York…
