A salute to the leaders and thinkers who break the rules for us all.
Welcome to the news from the other side -- of the river that is. Amid the launches and harbingers of all the latest yet-to-impact-our-lives information from Ad:Tech this week, yours truly is still recovering from a few days with the Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media: 04 across the river in my old home town (albeit briefly), Jersey City, NJ.
By now you’ve heard all the statistics. Yellow Pages online is big business. Local search is the next big thing. Maybe its here and maybe it isn’t. Maybe technology, advertising and consumer interest will finally intersect and users will be able to find what they are looking for in the locality of their choice.
Maybe all that will happen. Maybe it will happen today, and maybe it will happen tomorrow. I’ve got all of that information for you (links at the end of this week’s column) but as one of the original journalists writing about this little yellow corner of the Web I’d rather tell you a story -- a story about the entrepreneurial spirit and one that didn’t make the Johnny-Come-Lately information about a neighborhood of the Web some might call local.
And then, local light shone upon them
Part of me says it’s a beautiful thing, the news that is, of local search arriving in the market place and all of the press coverage. Another part of me keeps asking, what took everyone so long to wake up to the stats?
The Kesley Group has been around since 1986. And since then, they have been the standard for local marketing intelligence. Of course, way back then we called local marketing telephone directory advertising and it wasn’t nearly as sexy as the online universe has made local.
Telephone directory advertising was comprised of big regional mini-monopolies and a few rogue independent publishers who were breaking all the rules in order to pull what little advertising and audience share they could from the big boys in the space.
When the Internet arrived and I attended my first ad industry event (a Kelsey conference) back in the early 1990s, telephone directory publishers were among the leaders in trying to adapt print publications to the online medium.
Much like other areas of the Web popping up (bad pun) tiny parts of big organizations began to form in an effort to help guide the new medium. Big corporate was crawling its way onto the Web while suckling the teet of print directories, but the real story was in the entrepreneurs entering the space.
Big ideas, small traffic
Spirit and love of all things innovative drive players going up against big corporate. Ad models that are now standards in today’s local directory environment were developed faster and better than big publishers could comprehend.
If you attended a Kelsey conference five years ago, you would have heard stories about traditional publishers trying to keep up with smaller players because they knew how to adapt to the new medium. They had no loyalties to the big heavy book and no multi-layer bureaucracies to wade through in order to reach out to the new medium.
As history continually teaches us, big corporate rarely loses. Though much of what we see today in terms of ad formats came from the bold and brave new thinkers, smaller publishers could not keep up with the big players.
They simply did not have the traffic, or large laptop-equipped sales forces on the street helping fill the Internet yellow pages with ads. Later, national sales channels were prevented from advertising in independents via ad-revenue-goal choke holds.
An effective barrier, I might add, which remains in place today.
The bold new millennium
With top-level strategies in place, big publishers thought they had the business licked. They might have plodded along and decided for all of us the level of adoption we were entitled to had it not been for a new phenomenon developing in the background, the search engine.
Long before paid search arrived, search engines developed by strangers to the grey flannel universe of age-old firms began indexing content and sorting out local information. They crept up on the Internet yellow pages with their outlandish thoughts of enhanced productivity and strong intangible asset building methodologies, which flew in the face of the stagnating fear of decision-making corporate culture that exists in the giant firms -- the old-school culture, I am sad to say, which is still in place today.
However, I am starting to see signs of the slow death of bureaucratic dominance. Google is going local in a strong way and its stock is heading north of $200. Yahoo/Overture’s geo-orientated approach is solid and even the Ask Jeeve’s Butler wants to help me find Chinese food.
New technologies are emerging from companies like Ingenio, that provides pay-per-call advertising platforms for publishers and SME Global Solutions that places intelligent application and execution ahead of easy tech fixes for local marketers on a very large scale.
They are the new innovators, not yet discovered by mainstream press while slightly irreverent and boldly innovative. In short, I remain hopeful that change might just happen in my lifetime.
Buying the entrepreneurial spirit
Here’s a nod to the true believers, the people breaking the rules so that you and I can enjoy something new, different and better. The road to forcing innovation is one that will be inherently frustrating and difficult for those who dare travel it.
While there is something to be said for braving and accomplishing goals within the confines of big corporate red tape, we as an industry, and as a people, will always owe a debt to the innovators.
As many of you have now heard via formal press releases, random information leaks and a formal announcement at the Kelsey conference, Yellow Pages.Com will be acquired by BellSouth (RealPages.Com) and SBC (smartpages.com) in an effort to create a new powerhouse in the local Internet space. The new venture (as it has been called) will combine the efforts of the powerhouse publishers with the comparatively small local directory that, to many of us, was so much more than a clever URL identity.
Maybe I am a little too close to the project, but I have to give credit where it is due and offer my congratulations to the people at Yellow Pages.Com.
“This is a realization of eight years of planning and building. Not many get to see their strategy come to fruition in this manner,” says Dane Madsen, Yellow Pages.com’s chief executive. “Our investors have been well served, our employees will be well taken care of, and the vision, mission and ambition of this company will live on now, becoming the market force we all knew it would be.”
Hats off to Madsen, and to those whom I cannot name for building and innovating in an unforgiving environment that offers little margin for error. We await the next big thing from you.
About the Author: iMedia Search Editor Kevin Ryan’s current and former client roster reads like a “who’s who” in big brands; Rolex Watch, USA, State Farm Insurance, Farmers Insurance, Minolta Corporation, Samsung Electronics America, Toyota Motor Sales, USA, Panasonic Services, and the Hilton Hotels brands, to name a few. Kevin believes in sound guidance, creative thought, accountable actions and collaborative execution as applied to search, or any form of marketing. His principled approach and staunch commitment to the industry have made him one of the most sought after personalities in online marketing. Kevin volunteers his time with the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, and several regional non-profit organizations. In his off-time, Kevin enjoys serving as Vice President at Wahlstrom Interactive.
Meet Ryan at the Ad:Tech, NY November 8-10 and the iMedia Agency Summit December 5-8.
More information on local search:
- How will marketers find their target consumers as media convergence increases? The CEO of Geary Interactive shares some key adaptive strategies.
- More In Focus Articles »
