Yesterday, Idearc Media and Jingle Networks announced a partnership that counters AT&T's foray into the free DA business with its 1-800-YellowPages product. According to yesterday's announcement, Idearc's performance-based advertisers will receive additional exposure to buyers via Jingle's 1-800-FREE411 service. It…
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…
After four months of ownership, Yellow Pages Group of New Zealand’s owners are moving forward with the creation of a new executive management team. Among the moves, according to New Zealand’s m-net: “Dudley Enoka, who was general manager, will become the ex-Telecom…
HM Capital Partners has agreed to acquire Phone Directories Co. operations based in Orem, Utah. PDC publishes directories in 18 states covering 137 titles. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. According to a prepared statement by Peter Brodsky, a…
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…
In the San Diego edition of AT&T’s White Pages, a minor alphabetical error has some business owners seeing red. According to SignOnSanDiego.com, the latest edition of the San Diego business White Pages ran into trouble with listings beginning with the…
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…
Last night at the YPA awards dinner, Neg Norton announced that Local Insight Media has acquired Hawaiian Telcom’s Yellow Pages unit for US$435 million. This is another significant transaction for Local Insight, backed by the private equity Welsh, Carson, Anderson…
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…
The U.K.-based publisher Yell Group announced today that its U.S. operation, Yellow Book, is seeing a sharp decline in its organic growth rate, the accumulated result of too much competition in the U.S. market. The company is projecting a 3…
U.S. News & World Report features a short interview with AT&T Advertising & Publishing CEO Denny Payne in this week’s print edition (available online). Not much ground was broken in the interview, but Payne got across the usual major points…
Last week, Yell Group sold its Brazilian directory operation (TPI Brazil) to regional rival Publicar for US$8.5 million. This was a challenging market for Yell, which inherited the operation when it acquired the Spanish publisher TPI last year. Yell continues…
Saw an interesting announcement from Idearc Media that shows the publisher is trying to keep pace with the shifts occurring in consumer priorities. Idearc is introducing a Green Business Guide in its Madison, Wisconsin, book, which hits the streets in…
I had an interesting discussion this week with Amy Healy of the Yellow Pages Association. You may recall a few weeks back we blogged about a movement in Norway to give consumers the ability to opt out of print directory…
Apparently, those who were worried about AT&T Advertising & Publishing leaving its St. Louis headquarters digs can rest easy. This story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch suggests the decision was big news in St. Louis, since it affected more than…
Earlier this week I was rereading the transcript of the Nordic directory publisher Eniro's Q4 2006 earnings call, and I paid a bit more attention to an item I had glossed over the first time through, when I was more…
It's really the year of video on the Net, and local video plays a big role in that (and we're talking about more than the big rats that were filmed running amok at the TacoBell/KFC in Greenwich Village). At our…
Bambi Francisco wrote a column today weighing in on the notion of online video ads for local merchants. She recalls the launch, seven years ago, of VYP.com, a site devoted to video ads for plumbers, carpet cleaners and the like.…
AT&T Advertising & Publishing, the new directory organization arising from the combination of AT&T and BellSouth, is beginning to establish a new identity. The company announced this week that it would adopt "the AT&T Real Yellow Pages" as its new…
