My brother recently had a "vertical experience" in the Disneyland "Twilight Zone Tower of Terror." A 150-foot drop in a rickety old elevator. Three times, in fact. But Disney's vertical engineering legerdemain is less ambitious than that of the diverse…
Sami Kassab, analyst on the European Media Research Team at Exane BNP Paribas, gave a data-laden, insightful perspective on the many of the world's largest Yellow Pages publishers in "The Financial View" panel at Directional Media Strategies 2008. Highlights of Kassab's…
Three Yellow Pages organization represented on a panel this afternoon at Directional Media Strategies 2008 agreed that more transparency and investment in the product, particularly in the form of advertising, were keys to managing through time economic times. Speaking on…
Voice search has been put on the map over the past few years with the advent of free directory assistance service providers, not to mention Google (Goog411) and Microsoft (Tellme) entering the space. These services are increasingly educating the U.S. mobile…
A group of print Yellow Pages executives speaking at Directional Media Strategies 2008 challenged the notion that print usage and revenue growth are no longer realistic objectives. Jo Lynne Whiting of Sensis in Australia and Mike Brugman of Local Insight…
To follow up on the news item this morning that Spotzer has partnered with MerchantCircle, I was able to catch up with CEO Andy Klein here at the DMS conference. The deal will most notably bring ready-made video ads to…
Yellow Pages sales forces are greatly aided if they have comprehensive profiles of businesses ready to go. This can now be accomplished by Web crawling for company info, trademarks, logos, articles, management bios and other content, said 3L System Group…
Today sees a couple of more announcements in the local video space, both involving companies with a big presence here at The Kelsey Group's DMS conference. First off, local search platform provider Innovectra has partnered with Digital Media Communications to…
President and CEO Frank Jules, who has held the top slot at AT&T Advertising & Publishing for a year, laid out a prescription for Yellow Pages growth during a keynote at Kelsey's Directional Media Strategies conference in Atlanta, noting at the…
The theme of actively evolving local ad sales forces, touched upon by Charles Laughlin this morning, continued at DMS in a session titled "From Perception to Performance: The Sales Channel Revolution." "Multi-product selling is becoming a means to survival," said…
If you're here in Atlanta covering the DMS show, add the tag "DMS '08" to your posts and articles. I'll scrape and aggregate third-party coverage in periodic round-ups here on this blog.
To kick off DMS, Charles Laughlin, Kelsey Group program director and conference chair, presented a general state of the industry and the main issues it faces. First and foremost on this list is a general move toward evolving the local…
TKG's Directional Media Strategies conference kicked off this morning, and we'll blog most sessions here. There was an interesting session run by Michael Taylor throughout the morning to kick off our local sales training series. Direct local sales is a…
The online video space is crowded these days, so having a clear point of differentiation is critical. One of the more interesting players in this burgeoning field is Spotzer, which is trying to bridge the gap between quality content and…
The TechCrunch50 show wrapped up today and winners were announced. The grand prize ($50,000) went to Yammer, which is an enterprise version of Twitter that lets companies start internal communication networks. I missed the presentation on Monday but TechCrunch's Erick…
After the second day (my first) of the action-packed TechCrunch50 show, here are a few of the newly launched companies I got to talk to, and the reasons I liked them. To stay true to the show's title, I'll keep…
MapQuest today launched MapQuest Local, the biggest departure yet from its longstanding model as a place to primarily get driving directions. The company has been careful not to tinker with this model given its commanding market share lead in the…
When Insider Pages was sold to IAC's Citysearch, it seemed like it was probably a distress sale. Many of the Yellow Pages/ratings and review sites of 2004-2006 were falling apart at the same time. Since then, however, Insider Pages appears…
Today and tomorrow, I'm at the TechCrunch50 show in San Francisco. The show is basically Michael Arrington's answer to the DEMO conference series in which companies get five minutes on stage to show off newly launched online products. The difference…
Closely related to our recent ongoing coverage of Google's offline media efforts (TKG client Advisory released Friday as well), the company has signed a deal with NBC Universal to further push ad buying through its Google TV Ads platform. Google…
