Author: John Kelsey

Truth be told, I don't much enjoy watching awards ceremonies, which can be mind-numbingly dull if not done well. The YPA hired entertainer Roy Firestone, who did his best to liven up the evening. He was fine (although his show…

I find it interesting to see how other media portray the Yellow Pages. NewsAdvance.com, a product of The Lynchburg News & Advance, covered the planned introduction of Yellow Book into the Lynchburg area with the confusing headline, €œCompetitors Seeing Yellow.€…

I asked Gary Fascilla, Metro Directories CEO, to speak on the Leadership Panel at this year's Directory Driven Commerce conference in September. He accepted enthusiastically in part because of their recent success. Founded in 2001 after working at Valley and…

But you still have to ask if he senses a slowing down in the search business. When you run a business that has conferences (such as The Kelsey Group's events) long enough, you can feel the pulse of an industry.…

BAPCO showed stronger revenues in both the first and second quarters than it had in 2004. Verizon's earnings increased even as its revenues declined. As a result, Verizon's operating margins climbed from 45.9% to 47.3%. While SBC's margins declined, they…

It is interesting that €œLet your fingers do the walking,€ which was introduced in 1964 by AT&T€™s relatively small Yellow Pages division, came in No. 16. That puts our tagline ahead of such notables as €œPlease don€™t squeeze the Charmin€…

The Kelsey Group's overly simplistic model of the electronic world looks like this. Content can be information, advertising, video, etc.; the delivery of that content might be cable, DSL or wireless; and the device which is used for access could…

I don't buy either of these two arguments. Marketing works and dollars spent are additive. In 1979, AT&T decided that long-distance advertising should no longer be handled by each of the 21 individual operating companies. In a wildly unpopular move…

According to Amy Healy of the YPA, the public policy committee covered this topic in its Las Vegas meeting. She said that there are towns that have "do not deliver" proposals pending, but they stemmed from an effort to reduce…

Tom Mohr, president of Knight-Ridder Digital, added, "I sometimes don't think we have fully come to terms with the degree to which we need to undergo transformational change in order to be in a defensible position for the next five…

Specifically, digital radio can offer listeners very high-quality sound and allow stations to split their signals to increase channels. The problem is the conversion is expensive, perhaps $100,000 per radio station, and only listeners who have digital receivers will notice…

Sorry, but I simply don't believe Google will reach a trillion-dollar market cap. Don't get me wrong, Google is an incredible company. One of the things that I like about them is their relative modesty, something that is not often…

The Kelsey Group agrees that it is important to include IYP and local search products offered by publishers to help national advertisers make informed local Yellow Pages buying decisions. Our concern was that a method for including online look-ups could…

Let's start with sports. As any golfer knows, Tiger Woods' streak of making 142 consecutive cuts stretching back to February 1998 was broken last week at the Byron Nelson Championship. (Mr. Nelson's 11 consecutive wins on the tour is similar…

Everybody involved in hockey -- not just players and management, but people who sell beer or jerseys -- loses. No one who was not intimately involved in the negotiations can understand what went on between the two sides, but the…

At any rate, what is germane to this blog is that Harris asked about online search engines, Internet service providers and online retailers, all of whom did pretty well with 79%, 72% and 70% of adults saying they are doing…

The question is, why can€™t the big telco publishers participate in the revenue growth? If the U.S. Military Academy that trained Generals Grant and Lee can change to meet the needs of their country, surely telco publishers can change to…

Speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, Ruppert Murdoch faulted the industry for having been "remarkably, accountably complacent" about new technologies, including the Internet. In Frank Barnako's Internet Daily Report in MarketWatch, Murdoch is quoted as saying,…

Reading some of the recent Kelsey Group blogs reinforces this concern. Companies declare strong earnings but plummet because their guidance does not meet Wall Street expectations. Yahoo! and Google are offering evermore sophisticated search opportunities, and only industry experts can…

Stu's wife Carol, along with their son Doug, accepted this award, which was presented on the same night that Elmer Smith received a Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the industry. There is little question that Elmer was a…