It’s an interesting life, spending my days in the computer
department of a Yellow Pages publisher, while my evenings and weekends are
taken up with preparing for a lower-resource lifestyle that the end of cheap
energy will bring us. That’s a dichotomy
that took a while to come to terms with; I love technology, enjoy working in
the digital and mobile realms, and have invested significantly in my I.T. and
Management skills, yet my vision of the future is a world that is lower energy,
lower resources and considerable less affluent than the one we inhabit today.
Nothing has highlighted this conflict of expectations as
much as the planning for new digital products. Currently there is significant
demand for digital - in fact it’s the biggest objection our sales force hears
when selling Yellow Pages – “I don’t need to be in the book, I am on the
internet!” Recently we ran a series of training
course for our sales people, so they can explain better to our customers the
value of print over digital, why those customers are seeing a lack of returns
on their digital products, and a number of digital fallacies with the “adwords”
model which I highlighted almost two years ago on this blog.
Our salespeople were very surprised at how poorly Google Adwords
perform; by using Google's own tools, teaching them the Google keyword finder, they
know how to calculate how much each it costs the advertiser each time the
internet sends a customer their way. We’re
training our staff to impart that knowledge to our advertisers, because we want
the businesses in our local communities to be informed consumers of advertising
services, and that means giving them the tools to determine for themselves the
return-on-investment for each advertising dollar.
so far our digital products to date have been very
limited. For an extra ten percent of the
cost of the printed directory adverts, we can replicate the print advertising
package online, and in our mobile app.
If that seems cheap –and it is –it reflects how much value we place on digital
– worth perhaps a tenth of what the same exposure is worth in the books we
deliver to all the households in a community.
Since we do not have a national presence, we have a local customer base
around 5% of that of national yellow pages brands, we don't always score on the
first page of Google's results.
So how do we deliver value compared to them? If the advertiser has a website, another link
with the same name, address and phone number (NAT) increases the confidence
Google has in their web site being "trusted". I also suspect, from patterns in the data, that
myyp.com has a lot of business people visiting it, perhaps up to a third of the
traffic being B2B.
We regularly look at other digital products. Web sites are
an obvious example, with many Yellow Pages publishers selling web sites, SEO
services and other digital media, often from a third party. Vanity mobile applications for businesses, and
interactive ones that allow appointment setting, billing and a host of other
services between consumer and business, have caught our eye.
So far, nothing has convinced us that it's a good enough
value for the consumer, the advertiser, or ourselves, to adopt more than one product:
SMS messaging. What I like about this is the level of technology required to
support it: it works on the older "flip" style phones and will work
on the older models that supported text messaging, even those limited to
twitter-length messages.
I like it because it is resilient for an electronic product. It can work on a large number of phone platforms,
including ones we made when there was still technology manufacturing in the United
States. Even an eighties car phone, complete with brick battery, could receive
the marketing blast with the addition of a "modem" of the same era.
Am I disappointed we won’t get to play with the latest and
greatest digital products? Perhaps a little.
I still think there is time for a mobile application that helps refocus
the consumer on his or her local community, reward local loyalty behavior in
shopping patterns, and provide alternatives to the dollars hemorrhaging from
our communities to Wall Street via the big, publically traded corporations. Products
like punchcard are already a long way down the road, and I’ll be posting my
predictions on what any “game-changing” application might look like soon.
Products and services are not the only area where technology
meets the advertising world. Our techs
and programmers have their hands full making sure we are helping our sales
force provide the best value-for-money we can, to design, test and deploy the
systems that keep errors to a minimum, streamline the gathering and
presentation so those customers can make informed choices, and deliver those
choices to a still-loyal consumer base.
In the last few years we have taken our sales system
electronic, deployed mobile internet access for salespeople on the road, and
just last year we even gave our sale force smart phones. Tablets are under consideration and who
knows, the challenges of managing a few hundred iPads, Android tablets or
Windows 8 slates may be in our future.
They will be used to sell a product that has changed little in over a
century, and having stood the test of time will still be bringing value to
advertisers when our grandchildren are coping with a world defined by resource
depletion.
