YP has been growing in leaps and bounds since its 2012 launch. The company, formed by the consolidation of the former AT&T Interactive and Advertising Solutions groups by private equity firm Cerberus Capital, unveiled its new corporate signage installation atop its Glendale, CA headquarters on Monday.

“Its about time that Glendale got a pop of color. YP has arrived,” exclaimed YP CMO Allison Checchi to the group of employees and local business community members that had gathered atop a nearby parking structure to watch the unveiling.

YP has been a long-time member of the local Glendale and Los Angeles based technology community, and in the last few years has grown to become one of the largest tech-industry employers in the region.

Company CTO Darren Clark remarked that the executive team has been set on making YP a powerhouse technology brand since its launch, and initiatives like city-wide private employee shuttle services (similar to services Facebook and Google provide in the San Francisco region for employees) and community outreach have helped to make YP a prominent voice in the fast-growing Los Angeles tech scene.

The company’s LA/Glendale-based digital headquarters have been a vital part of YP’s transformation from a traditional print media business to a digital media leader. Over the past 5 years, YP’s digital solutions have grown from 18% of total revenue in 2009 to more than half in 2015 generating more than $1 billion in revenue.

The Glendale headquarters are home to the company’s product, engineering and technical teams of more than 800 people, and it has grown the office by more than 25 percent since 2013, just after it spun out of AT&T.

Due to YP’s growth, it has become the anchor tenet of 611 N. Brand Blvd, occupying 6 floors covering more than 145,000 square feet of office space. With the expansion, YP was granted signage rights on the building, allowing it to prominently showcase its brand in downtown Glendale and to the thousands of commuters traveling on the 134 freeway.

YP CMO Allison Checchi, CTO Darren Clark, and CXO Mark Ploof addressing the audience at the company’s building sign unveiling on Monday

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YP has made a major push in the past week to become a bigger player in search and to do more to monetize its own search traffic on YP.com, as well as its mobile apps. In the past week the company has made two significant search related announcements.

Last week, YP unveiled ypSearch, a new search platform that is aimed at using YP’s sizable traffic, 80 million monthly visitors, in combination with major search engine traffic to deliver leads to small-business advertisers.

A unique feature of ypSearch will be its ability to fulfill and create search marketing campaigns across both major search engines as well as the core YP.com IYP portal, where ypSearch ad units will be displayed alongside relevant YP.com business listings.

By combining campaign fulfillment and management under a single search marketing platform, operated directly by YP, the company hopes to create greater efficiency in managing portfolio-wide cost-per-lead, as well as within high-traffic advertiser verticals. This will likely allow for margin increases in time, as third-party SEM vendor platforms are taken out of the process, and greater campaign transparency and control are brought in-house.

ypSearch will support campaigns across the major search engines initially (Google, Bing/Yahoo) — but may include other traffic and lead sources in the future.

This week, YP announced ypSearch Marketplace, which is a keyword-bidded local search marketplace that is aimed at pulling major brand messages into local markets. This announcement fits right into the national brands/local targeting theme of BIA/Kelsey’s National conference, taking place later this month in Dallas.

ypSearch Marketplace is the company’s biggest move into the emerging programmatic advertising space. The new platform allows agency and brand advertisers to directly purchase YP ad/search inventory in a similar fashion to other programmatic advertising.

Both announcements fit into some broader theme taking place at YP. One is the movement to own more of the technology that drives the business, and be less reliant on third parties to drive key businesses like search. The second is to make owned and operated traffic a bigger component of search, which of course means better margins for YP.

The company also argues that its owned and operated traffic is also good for advertisers. The company cited data from a study it conducted with comscore showing that people who initiate a search on YP are more influenced by advertising that those who begin a search elsewhere, with 66 percent making a purchase post search, and 61 percent searching for businesses that they saw in an ad.

In a briefing last week with BIA/Kelsey analysts, YP CTO Darren Clark discussed the larger context around these new announcements.

One key point was that YP is now generating much more of its traffic via organic means, rather than via paid search. The company used to be heavily reliant on paid search to bring users to its door.

“We have gotten a lot better at SEO,” Clark told us. “We are much less dependent on SEM.”

As YP launches new platforms to better monetize its own traffic, the company’s sales approach is evolving as well. The sales conversations are increasingly about getting found by ready to buy consumers and on targeting the right audience.

“We are tilting everything toward lead delivery,” Clark said.

BIA/Kelsey’s Abid Chaudhry contributed to this post.

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Traditional media companies struggle to find the right formula for digital sales. The challenge isn’t really about deciding whether to go with a pure digital only approach v. relying completely on existing legacy sales resources. The decision matrix is much more complex than this binary choice. Publishers need to use their existing sales assets to grow digital revenue. Failing to do so simply isn’t practical for most companies. But publishers also need to bring in more digital expertise and make many important strategic decisions about sales structure.

A new BIA/Kelsey Insight Paper, “Old House vs. New House: Building Optimal Digital Sales Teams,” xamines the challenges involved in building digital teams and finding the optimal sales structure. The report is co-authored by me and Stacey Sedbrook, BIA/Kelsey’s VP of Strategic Sales Consulting, and is the first of several sales-related Insight Papers we will co-author this year.

The report’s executive summary is below and BIA/Kelsey clients can read the full paper by logging into the client portal. The report is also available for purchase.

Traditional media companies struggle with how to build optimal digital sales organizations. The conversation often comes down to a binary choice: should a media organization rely on a digital-only sales force or a multimedia one?

The truth is, it isn’t “either-or.” It’s both. Legacy media companies need to look at segmentation by product, giving legacy sellers inventory that they can easily sell (hint: this tends toward products that are owned and operated by the media company), and leaving more complex and higher value digital sales to digital specialists.

BIA/Kelsey did an analysis using real performance data from a range of local media companies struggling with this sales structure challenge. The message that emerged from this exercise was clear. Yes, digital-only sellers will leave legacy sellers in their dust on a one-to-one comparison. Legacy sellers, however, represent more sales volume and should be a key component in moving organizations from majority legacy revenue to majority digital.

There is a strong body of opinion that legacy sellers are minimally useful in the shift to digital.

“If you are a traditional media company, and you take 20 of your legacy sales reps, maybe one or two will become performers over time,” one senior traditional media sales executive recently told us. “The best approach is to create a separate digital channel, treated as a stand-alone and managed by someone who can work with the core channel. Then use your core channel as a lead source for digital sellers.”

Our experience and analysis show that with the right product segmentation, digital sellers and legacy sellers can complement each other and lead to a better overall outcome than in a digital-only structure.

Traditional media companies need to think more strategically about how to drive digital revenue. While digital specialization is ideal, the investment required to build a digital-only sales force in short order that can drive sufficient sales volume is too high for most traditional media organizations. Therefore legacy sellers will need to play a big role in digital selling, at least in the near term.

Traditional media companies that focus on sales reporting structure, compensation and smart packaging as part of their digital transformation will put themselves in the best position for sustainable success. This Insight Paper examines the arguments for specialization and for using a hybrid approach to digital selling.

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Home and Trade Services SMBs report their most popular channels to use are from traditional media: newspapers, print yellow pages and direct mail. Digital is also part of the Top 5 most used with Facebook pages and a website rounding it out. Given the vertical’s heavy reliance on traditional media, there’s an opportunity for traditional media players to bundle digital media to their offerings.

Home and Trade Services is the only vertical industry in our study with print yellow pages among the Top 5 media used for advertising and promotion, and was only in the Top 10 of one other vertical — Professional Services. Print yellow pages also had the highest return on investment (ROI) of the top three traditional media — with nearly 28% saying that their ROI on print yellow pages was either excellent (10-19x) or extraordinary (over 20x) spend.

SMBs in the Home and Trade Vertical had an average annual advertising spend of $12,573 in Wave 18 (Q3/2014), down from $19,238 in the previous wave (Q3/2013). Home and Trade Service SMBs overall will not increase their ad budget in 2015. Nearly 61% of the SMBs in the Home and Trade Services vertical reported that they would maintain their ad spend over the next 12 months and 20.8% say they will increase. While SMBs in the Home and Trade Services utilize traditional media, their budget allocation for digital is increasing. On average, SMBs in the Home and Trade Services vertical allocated 24.7% of their advertising budget to digital in the last 12 months. Over the next 12 months, they report plans to increase it to 27.7%.

Local media players, especially in the traditional channels, have an opportunity to continue to serve their Home and Trade Services SMBs through traditional channels as well as grabbing more of their ad dollars by offering digital products.

Clients of the BIA/Kelsey Advisory Services can find the full Home and Trade Services vertical report here. Interested in finding out more about our LCM survey? Click here.

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We live in a multi-screen world, where an action begun on one device is often completed on another. Marketers are eager to follow a consumer all the way along this cross-device chain of actions. That’s the cross-device retargeting challenge, and YP has entered the game with a new product, aptly named Cross Device Retargeting, that helps brands do just that.

According to comscore data from a survey that YP commissioned, 73 percent of YP searchers switch devices to complete local business searches.

YP is working with Tapad to power Cross Device Retargeting, which enables advertisers to begin serving messages to consumers wherever they start a search, and as they switch devices, they can continue targeting that consumer, across desktop and mobile websites and within apps.

“National brands are trying to focus beyond location to precise behaviors,” said David Lebow, Chief Revenue Officer at YP, in a statement. “With cross device retargeting, we now have the ability to reach consumers at critical moments in the purchase process no matter the device they’re using.”

Retargeting is increasingly critical to marketers. One survey conducted jointly by Adroll (a retargeting company) and Qualtrics found that the share of marketers that report spending 10 to 50 percent of their budget on retargeting rose from 53 percent in 2013 to 71 percent last year. Budgets are going up because retargeting works. According to the same survey, “92 percent of marketers report retargeting performs equal to or better than search, 91 percent equal to or better than email, and 92 percent equal to or better than other display.”

The larger context here is of course the shift from desktop to mobile search. In recognition of that trend, for example, Google tested out a desktop to mobile retargeting product last year.

Speaking of Google, YP recently earned the search giant’s 2014 North America Premier SMB Partner (PSP) Award for “Highest Growth.” This award recognizes the Google partner with the highest new AdWords revenue from new accounts. YP touches about a half million SMB advertisers with its various print, desktop and mobile products.

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A sea change in home repair habits is occurring, as consumer segments begin to shift from Do It Yourself to Do it For Me models where people are seeking professionals to do everything from changing light bulbs to building decks. As Home Depot Silicon Valley head Anthony Roddio noted at our ILM 2014 event in December, “The market is ripe but no one is there yet.”

To date, Angie’s List and HomeAdvisor (formerly ServiceMagic) have been the ones to beat in the home repair online marketplace. But relative newcomers such as Home Depot (Red Beacon), Pro.com, Handy, HomeJoy, Serviz and Thumbtack are also revving it up. Looming in the background are skunkworks from giant “directory” players such as Amazon.

Home Advisor and Serviz have recently talked to us about their respective approaches. In fact, HomeAdvisor has just formally announced its entry into on demand scheduling for contractors; a new model that will complement its traditional model of providing several referrals in which consumers have to pick and choose, schedule and call themselves.

To HomeAdvisor CEO Chris Terrill, the demand for scheduling vetted professionals at pre-set prices is something that may develop over a period of time. It won’t cause a sudden change in business models. But it will serve two key functions: attracting new customers outside of the company’s traditional 35-60 year old customer set; and begin the process of repositioning the company as a comprehensive provider of information and services for home repair.

“We are building a robust marketplace,” he says. “We have tools that work for pros. If pros want to pay the company to book services for them, fine. If they want to pay for advertising, fine.”

Terrill notes that On Demand scheduling has been in a test mode in several cities. It will now be rolled out nationwide, but won’t receive dedicated marketing – at least, at first. It will mostly remain under the radar in pilot/learn model for three or four months. “We’ll expose people to it as they come in,” he says.

He also expresses confidence that the company’s ability to scale scheduled services will prove to be its ace in the hole. As a longtime leader in the space, HomeAdvisor has the most robust cost guide with real prices for each geo market, he said . It is not survey data. We do it at scale. A lot of people are introducing similar services, but they are not very satisfactory because they can’t meet the demands in each market, he says.

Serviz CEO Zorik Gordon — who formerly served as CEO of ReachLocal — notes that his focus is entirely on creative on demand home services, rather than a marketplace.Serviz, which has 20 plus employees at headquarters, in addition to about 100 technicians, has recently raised a $12.5 Million Series B equity financing round led by PointGuard Ventures.  With the money, Serviz will expand beyond its five core categories. More critically, it will also expand its operations beyond its home base of the Los Angeles and Orange County markets.

The key to its success will be to provide super-efficient, mobile-based services that allow booking and buying to be completed in 30 seconds, says Gordon. Another key: focus on the transparency of pricing, enabling independents to lower their pricing for high-end services in return for more business. Under the Serviz model, Gordon claims that all prices are “substantially lower” than existing home service companies.

“We are taking an Amazon-like approach of being a real price disruptor,” says Gordon. “We are building a horizontal platform around higher end home services such as HVAC and electrical work.”

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Dex Media announced today that former Yellowbook CEO Joe Walsh will take over as its President and CEO, replacing Peter McDonald.

It has been widely rumored for some time that Walsh was in line for a key role at Dex Media. Walsh and his former Yellowbook colleagues Gary Shaw and Gordon Henry have recently been doing consulting work at Dex Media. Their presence sparked rumors that a succession plan was in the works, likely involving Walsh, 51, replacing the 64 year old McDonald, who came out of retirement to run SuperMedia, which later merged with Dex One to become Dex Media.

Walsh was a popular leader at Yellowbook, but he left the company in 2011, not long after its parent company Yell (later renamed hibu) brought in a new management team led by Mike Pocock. Since leaving hibu, Walsh has consulted and served on boards and has remained visible at local search industry conferences.

Walsh’s leadership of Yellowbook changed the U.S. Yellow Pages landscape.  Through expansion and acquisition, he built the publishers from a small regional independent into a roughly $2 billion giant that challenged incumbent publishers, particularly in major markets.

Yellowbook’s push into large markets was advanced when it was acquired by British Telecom (later Yell). Major metros had once been considered too expensive for small publishers to take on, but BT gave Yellowbook the necessary financial wherewithal. Walsh’s mantra was that the then utility based incumbent publishers (one of which he now runs) charged too much for their advertising, while Yellowbook offered small business advertisers a lower cost per lead.

While it may take a little while to get a sense of where Walsh wants to take Dex Media, his appointment does raise immediate speculation about another wave of industry consolidation. Back in 2011, Walsh gave a keynote address at a BIA/Kelsey conference in which he made the case for the ultimate consolidation of the major U.S. directory publishers.

In that address, Walsh said his analysis showed that consolidating two major directory companies would help stabilize revenues declines and improve margins. Much has transpired since that presentation, including the Dex One/SuperMedia merger, which created the company Walsh now leads.

Walsh and McDonald will take questions on the transition on Dex Media’s November 4 Q3 earnings call. One question that may come up is whether Walsh still advocates consolidation.

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The Yellow Pages brand is both blessing and curse for those trying to morph legacy directory businesses into digital solutions providers for SMBs. Yellow Media CEO Julien Billot conceded as much in his keynote presentation at BIA/Kelsey’s recent SMB Digital Marketing conference in San Francisco. However Billot believes the smarter play is to invest in transforming the “Yellow” brand vs. trying to build a new brand from scratch.

Under his leadership, Yellow Media has increased its branding investment from C$6 million in 2013 to roughly C$25 million this year, with the aim of convincing Canadian consumers and businesses that Yellow Media is much more than a print publisher. The end game is more organic traffic to generate higher margin digital sales.

Billot is also driving change in the sales approach and business model, moving to a continuous contact sales model and a product approach based more on selling performance than selling media. The following video shows my Q&A with Billot following his presentation on Day 1 of the conference. Here are a few snippets of what he had to say:

On the Yellow Pages Brand

“Basically when you talk to customers and users, they say ‘Yellow Pages’ is the major reason why customers open the door today, and it is the major reason why they don’t sign with us. So it is a difficult choice…Letting go of the Yellow Pages brand means you lose your main argument to talk to small companies…But if you leave the brand in the situation it is today, it is a handicap and no more an asset.”

On Sales Transformation

“Today our best sales representatives meet with customers six to 10 times per year and spent two hours in each of these meetings. In the past, we would ask, ‘Do you want to be in print?’ and ‘Please sign.’ and it would be over for the year…The time when a sales reps owns the relationship by himself is finished. Now we are into multi-touchpoint relationships. Sales by somebody and upsell by somebody else, on the phone or physically or via self serve. We want to be sure we are having an ongoing conversation with our customers.”

On the Business Model

“We are switching from a placement based product to a leads based product. This is why investing in our media is so important. Because today we sell a leads-based product — SEM from Google. It is good. Customers want it. But it is bad in terms of margin. Longer term we will still sell Google. But we want to repackage into this bundle some of our own traffic to be able to generate more margin.”

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The Yellow Pages brand is both blessing and curse for those trying to morph legacy directory businesses into digital solutions providers for SMBs. Yellow Media CEO Julien Billot conceded as much in his keynote presentation at BIA/Kelsey’s recent SMB Digital Marketing conference in San Francisco. However Billot believes the smarter play is to invest in transforming the “Yellow” brand vs. trying to build a new brand from scratch.

Under his leadership, Yellow Media has increased its branding investment from C$6 million in 2013 to roughly C$25 million this year, with the aim of convincing Canadian consumers and businesses that Yellow Media is much more than a print publisher. The end game is more organic traffic to generate higher margin digital sales.

Billot is also driving change in the sales approach and business model, moving to a continuous contact sales model and a product approach based more on selling performance than selling media. The following video shows my Q&A with Billot following his presentation on Day 1 of the conference. Here are a few snippets of what he had to say:

On the Yellow Pages Brand

“Basically when you talk to customers and users, they say ‘Yellow Pages’ is the major reason why customers open the door today, and it is the major reason why they don’t sign with us. So it is a difficult choice…Letting go of the Yellow Pages brand means you lose your main argument to talk to small companies…But if you leave the brand in the situation it is today, it is a handicap and no more an asset.”

On Sales Transformation

“Today our best sales representatives meet with customers six to 10 times per year and spent two hours in each of these meetings. In the past, we would ask, ‘Do you want to be in print?’ and ‘Please sign.’ and it would be over for the year…The time when a sales reps owns the relationship by himself is finished. Now we are into multi-touchpoint relationships. Sales by somebody and upsell by somebody else, on the phone or physically or via self serve. We want to be sure we are having an ongoing conversation with our customers.”

On the Business Model

“We are switching from a placement based product to a leads based product. This is why investing in our media is so important. Because today we sell a leads-based product — SEM from Google. It is good. Customers want it. But it is bad in terms of margin. Longer term we will still sell Google. But we want to repackage into this bundle some of our own traffic to be able to generate more margin.”

The post Conference Video: Q&A with Yellow Media's Julien Billot appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The big announcement this morning at Leading in Local: SMB Digital Marketing — The Berry Company has acquired LocalVox for an undisclosed amount. Berry was already an investor in LocalVox and has been one of the leading resellers of the marketing automation firm’s LocalCast product.

Laura Cole, Berry’s VP of Marketing, told us the acquisition was important for Berry, which wanted to own its own marketing automation platform. She said the success Berry has been having in the field selling LocalCast (and its next level product, SearchCast) and LocalVox’s strong team were also determining factors. LocalVox founders Trevor Sumner and David Pachter have agreed to stay on.

LocalVox offers a platform for creating and distributing content for SMBs using a do it with me model. They are at the owned and earned vs. paid end of the media spectrum. They offer a platform that allows SMBs to efficiency distribute content across multiple platforms — websites, social media, directories, email marketing and so on.

“We have been trialing it for the past 18 months in a number of markets,” Cole said. “It’s been very successful. It is among our best performing products retention wise. To own the technology is an important step for us. We are not just sitting still.”

We also spoke with Sumner yesterday and he told us the acquisition will give LocalVox resources move the business forward.

“Berry has been very supportive,” he said. “They will invest to get us to scale.”

The Berry-LocalVox partnership dates back to late 2012, when the two companies announced a deal to offer LocalVox products through the Berry sales organization. Berry was also an investor in LocalVox before making the full acquisition, which closed last week.

Cole said Berry would not prevent LocalVox from seeking new partners and resellers under its ownership. She also said that Berry is open to addition acquisitions if they make sense.

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