Seeking to overcome the perception that print yellow pages is a waste of paper or that it flies in the face of the greengeist, the Yellow Pages Association has launched an initiative intended to showcase environmentally friendly thinking:
[T]he Think Green Column on its Yellow is Green Environmental Web site. Appearing monthly, the Think Green Columns share opinions, ideas and even historical perspectives on the environment and the yellow pages.
In a big geographic expansion of its in-store screens, RippleTV announced that it had formed a partnership with Einstein Bros/Noahs Bagels (ENRG):
With the addition of screens in Einstein Bros. and Noah’s, the Ripple network will reach nearly 30 million people each month, expanding Ripple’s footprint in the Midwestern and Eastern regions, particularly the major metropolitan markets of Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Washington D.C., Philadelphia and Miami.
ENRG has “639 company owned, licensed and franchised locations in 34 states.”
Ripple says on its site that it has 1,500 locations in multiple states and is now “coast to coast.” Ripple has a very compelling offering and ultimate success is about building out as many locations as possible. After that it’s a no-brainer that one of the big outdoor shops will pick them up.
Here are the newest numbers for national and local advertising from Robert Coen:
Source: Magna/Coen
Coen says that the economy is hurting local entrepreneurs and that in turn is hurting local media. Take all these numbers with a grain of salt, but they’re probably directionlly accurate.
CityVoter has announced expansion of its relationship with Hearst-Argyle Television:
Already working with KCRA Sacramento, WPBF West Palm Beach, WESH Orlando, WISN Milwaukee, and WAPT Jackson, CityVoter.com will provide KETV Omaha, KMBC Kansas City, and WLKY Louisville with the CityVoter social platform, allowing insiders who know a city best to share their insight with information, ratings, and reviews on the everyday decisions that affect people’s daily lives. Omaha launched June 16, 2008. Kansas City and Louisville will launch in August 2008.
Call it prelude to an acquisition . . .
In addition to a destination, CityVoter has created a local search platform for local TV and radio, two segments otherwise neglected online. And the company has taken a very smart approach to UGC. Rather than ask users to write reviews, it asks them to vote on best places (often based on user Q&A). This amounts to the same content in the end and it lowers the bar to participation:
Newspapers are in turmoil and cutting costs to save their lives. A headline in MediaPost says (and then explains) it all: Into the Red, Newspapers Face Collapse. Here’s a depressing and representative tidbit from the piece, discussing the highly debt-laden state of newspaper companies and how these companies are carving themselves up to service that debt:
This year, the company has raised $121 million with the sale of a Hollywood studio and $650 million with the sale of Newsday to Cablevision; the Chicago Cubs baseball team and historic Tribune Tower in downtown Chicago are also on the block. On the cost-cutting side, management announced a new 50-50 policy, whereby its newspapers will contain no more than 50% editorial content, allowing significant staff reductions.
And here’s an eloquent lament on the state of newspapers from the NY Times. (I agree, newspapers aren’t just another business sector.)
Yellow pages companies are challenged by similar pressures and market forces. Lowered guidance amid a recession, high levels of debt and declining share value has already claimed top YP execs and Yell’s CEO looks to be the next in line, speculates Forbes.
Putting aside servicing debt payments, which is a major issue in some cases, historical margins are a problem for both YP and newspaper publishers. Forty to 50%+ margins are probably no longer sustainable amid a fragmenting marketplace and increasing competition from lower priced ad products online. But public companies are in a bind in trying to manage through this because investors simply don’t want to hear such sober talk. They’ll likely punish the shares of these companies further.
I’m not picking on YP or newspapers, similar pressures exist for TV, magazines and almost the whole of “traditional media.” It’s not limited to any individual sector.
If you were running a public YP publisher or print newspaper company, what would you do?
EW Scripps has split itself into two companies: one featuring local TV stations and print newspapers (EW Scripps) and the other combining its online and cable TV properties (Scripps Networks Interactive). It’s a pretty clear case of growth vs. stasis, “new media” vs. “old media” in the minds of Scripps executives.
The new SNI (the other way would have been “SIN”) contains:
Lifestyle Media, with popular lifestyle television and Internet brands HGTV, Food Network, DIY Network, Fine Living Network and country music network Great American Country (GAC); and Interactive Services, with leading online search and comparison shopping services, Shopzilla and uSwitch.
The decision was largely motivated by the drag that the traditional media part of the business had on the stock price of the company as a whole. It’s too bad, however, that the company wasn’t able to tell a compelling enough story to the market about the combined value of traditional and online/new media.
I’m on an online discussion forum and it was just pointed out there by Leslie Laredo of The Laredo Group that the average age of print newspaper readers (per the NAA) and network TV viewers is now 50. I don’t have the demographic information in front of me, but I would imagine the story is similar for radio (depending on the format) and print yellow pages (not sure ’cause I haven’t seen the data recently).
Audiences for traditional media are getting older, while younger audiences have gone online or embraced “on-demand” and “new” media. For example, ad-supported UK MVNO Blyk presents itself not as a mobile marketing channel but as a youth marketing channel. The mediums themselves will not die but their core audiences are getting older. This is a more subtle evolution of the market. Thus, in order to reach the broad audiences that these media once reached advertisers will need to diversify their ad spend, which is in fact happening.
The most dangerous part of these demographic data for the mediums is the perception that they’re no longer as relevant. In fact, older audiences have more money than younger ones as a rule, and these are highly desirable consumers but not to all marketers.
The age data put pressure on traditional media to expand distribution — hence TV’s move onto the Internet — and tell a more complex story to advertisers and the marketplace.
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Related: C-Level execs. prefer the Internet to other media as a news and information source (per Forbes/Gartner). This is a leading indicator of where they’re likely to spend their companies’ marketing dollars in the future.
First Briggs Ferguson took over the helm at Superpages. Now Mark Canon, formerly of AutoByTel and AOL, is joining Yell as head of new media in the UK. Canon, who was also one of the founders of Switchboard (now owned by Idearc), is very smart and is a strong choice for Yell.
These are “new media” guys moving into traditional media companies. Yesterday Google hired an executive from Bell Canada to be its CFO (”old media” to “new media”) — cross pollination, one might say.
According to the Yell press release, Cannon “joins Yell on July 9 and will take direct responsibility for the UK’s new media teams covering strategy, product and service development, and technology across internet, voice and mobile channels.”
Yell has been suffering stock declines in the same way its American counterparts have, as investors react to recessionary pressures. But they’re also nervous about the long-term outlook for the industry.
I’m sure Canon will bring some fresh perspective and energy to the newly created role. Yell is privileged in a way that American directory publishers are not because it owns the yellow pages brand. However, with increasing competition from “2.0″ style sites in the UK (TrustedPlaces, Welovelocal, TouchLocal, etc.), that’s not the asset it once was.
But Yell has also been more proactive about expanding its online content than other publishers and it has moved more aggressively into mobile than other directory publishers (this is true in Europe more generally).
It’s mostly bad news. As MediaPost explains in some detail, classifieds were off nearly 25% in Q1. Online revenues grew just over 7%, while total print advertising revenues were off 14.3% (national, retail and classifieds). Both cyclical and structural factors are playing here.
On the semi-bright side, newspaper site traffic is growing (per Nielsen). And a new study under the title “When Advertising Works” from consumer research firm Yankelovich compared the effectiveness of traditional and digital media. According to a report in the NY Times, this is the bottom line:
When asked what kind of an impression the ad made, 56 percent of survey respondents said traditional media ads made a positive impression, in contrast to 31 percent who said that about digital media ads. Thirteen percent reported a negative impression of traditional media ads versus 21 percent for digital media ads. Thirty-two percent said they had neither a positive nor a negative impression of traditional media ads, in contrast to 48 percent who said they had neither a good or bad impression of digital media ads.
In other words, traditional ads were more favorably regarded that online advertising. Here’s some explanation from Yankelovich:
A principal reason for those results, said J. Walker Smith, president at the Yankelovich Monitor division of Yankelovich in Atlanta, was that for ads that made an impression, consumers using traditional media were in a more positive mood and more likely to be interested in entertainment and relaxation. By comparison, consumers using digital media were more likely to be in busy moods, seeking control or solving a problem, Mr. Smith said, and they were more likely to be by themselves. In contrast, traditional media are often watched, listened to or read by people in groups.
This finding was also interesting:
Another highlight of the study, according to Mr. Smith, is that ads that made an impression in traditional media were more likely to stimulate word of mouth than ads that made an impression in digital media.
Last year, Nielsen similarly found the traditional media ads were more trusted than most online ad types. Accordingly, one might conclude that traditional advertising has greater “impact,” while online is more “efficient” in some respects.
What all this means is that large advertisers cannot and should not abandon traditional media (see also the discussion of findings re the “synergy” between newspapers and online). They must learn to integrate and combine traditional and online more effectively.
New research from OTX (n=750, US teens 13-17) has found that teens prefer the real world to online. The survey found that teens are spending an average of 11.5 hours per week online, with roughly 24% spending 15 hours per week online.
Here are the “top online activities” for teens according to the OTX findings:
Yet the study also found that, contrary to popular perceptions, teens would rather live in the real world:
Would you rather
Have a lot of “real friends” 91%
Have a lot of “online friends” 9%
Date someone you know from school 87%
Date someone you meet on the Internet 13%
Shop in a store 82%
Shop online 18%
Watch a full length program on TV 81%
Watch a full length program online 19%
No television for a week 74%
No Internet for a week 26%
Get information from the Internet 71%
Get information from traditional media like TV, magazines, or newspapers 29%
Give up cell phone texting 71%
Give up Internet access 29%
Get your locker vandalized 63%
Get your personal homepage of profile vandalized 37%
Be limited to a TV antenna for watching TV 63%
Be limited to a dial up connection to access the Internet 37%
IM your friend 54%
Call your friend 46%
There are a few things to point out here:
This is a single study but what emerges from these findings is that teens regard the Internet as a tool rather than a lifestyle as many have suggested. It also shows that most are grounded in the real world and have a reasonably healthy perspective on technology.
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Correction: as was pointed out to me, I read the data incorrectly. It appears that teens would rather give up text messaging before the Internet. This is somewhat contradicted by data from the Pew Internet Project showing cellphones would be the last item of technology people would give up (vs. TV, Internet). That was in my head as I wrote this.
I suspect the teens equated the Internet and IM and would prefer to give up SMS before IM. I’m somewhat skeptical of the result as presented and believe the wording of the question probably influenced the finding.
This is Nielsen data for March, 2008. The table below the chart shows the percentage distribution:
I got the data above from Marketing Charts. If these numbers are accurate it suggests that TV in the aggregate controls more than 60% of the national ad spend, while the Internet sees just over 7%. This is a clear case of the advertisers and agencies lagging consumers who are not abandoning TV but paying less and less attention to it.
Compare data from the IAB on the distribution of the ad spend. You’d have to do the math and reconcile the categories to make an apples to apples comparison but the following disagrees with the Nielsen data (at least in terms of newspaper share):
This morning ShopLocal announced a partnership with Yahoo! that will see distribution of ShopLocal’s inventory of retailer “circular ads” across the Yahoo! network. These are all local ads because they’re tied to specific stores or retailers in particular areas:
Retailers will now be able to reach potential shoppers among Yahoo!’s 140 million monthly unique U.S. audience(1) more efficiently and with greater precision than ever before by harnessing Yahoo!’s Smart Ads technology which automatically generates customized advertising based on users’ preferences. The program is intended to supplement existing newspaper-based marketing programs for retailers by delivering other key benefits like incremental reach, cost efficiency, flexibility in regional pricing and product availability, as well as the opportunity to deliver advertising throughout the week - not just on Sundays when circulars appear most often.
Yahoo! takes ShopLocal circular content and will configure ads dynamically based on user search and behavioral data, geotargeting, demographic and contextual targeting parameters. Geotarageting will be based on user registration information, IP targeting and search data.
The ads are being assembled from different creative and text components. As they “expire,” because they’re all time-based, they’ll be pulled from the system (that’s part of the ShopLocal “secret sauce”). The ads will appear in various places throughout the Yahoo! network.
This is a big deal because of the degree of dynamic personalization being brought to the inventory for both users and retailers. It’s a validation in some sense of Yahoo!’s dynamic ad serving strategy. One would expect response rates to be much better than the >.25% that display ads typically see online. Retailers, through the Yahoo! distribution, will be getting massive reach, although the ads will be theoretically targeted to individuals.
The search component will contribute to behavioral data factored into the targeting. For example, if I perform a search on Yahoo! for “laptop computer,” I could well see a display ad for “laptops on sale” at my local Best Buy somewhere else on Yahoo! later in the day or week.
The strategy and model are also consistent with the dominant consumer use case associated with products: research online, buy offline.
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Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land has written up a number of other Yahoo! announcements made today.
There used to be 210 markets (DMAs) in the United States. Now there is one: The Internet. Of course that’s a radical oversimplification. However all the separate state and local markets that could support lots of TV affiliates, newspapers, weekly shoppers, community publications, radio stations, and directory publishers are essentially disappearing.
The “local Internet” consists of thousands of sites. But few of these sites can make the kind of money that the traditional media have historically been able to make. That’s because few of them have the reach online that traditional media had in their respective markets and because of the economics of performance-based advertising, which requires massive scale to pay off (on a “per-click” basis).
Think of traditional media as endangered species in the media ecosystem. And as these players shrink or become extinct “media diversity” (like biodiversity) is compromised.
What prompted me to write this is a Reuters piece that appeared today, which reports on a prediction by investment firm Sanford C. Bernstein that the US Internet would be dominated by “two strong players” (Google, Amazon). This is an incorrect oversimplification but there may be a directional sense in which it’s accurate.
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Here are data and profiles on 23 top newspapers and their websites.
Borrell Associates has always been one of the most aggressive forecasters when it comes to the local market. The revenue projection for 2009 is $18.2 billion, growing to $23 billion by 2012. To put that first number is perspective, it would represent about 60% of online ad revenue in 2009 (based on an assumption of $30 billion in overall online ad spending).
Borrell’s numbers contain search, display, classifieds and video.
I don’t have the report, but have seen the third party write ups. MediaPost has a good overview of the numbers:
I suspect the newspaper share is so high (although declining) because all the ad spending on newspaper sites is simply assumed to be local. The report’s methodology involves a survey of the various publishers and I suspect that newspaper accounting practices also result in an inflation of “online” ad dollars attributed to them.
Borrell also says that YP publishers have the greatest percentage of traditional to online revenues, ranging from 9.1% to 10.7%. Newspapers hover right around 8%, these days, in the US.
Another interesting data point, Borrell estimates the relative CPMs for IYP vs. print YP: $3.65 vs. $9.29.
Coming back to the Bay Area in the airport (SFO) last night I noticed an extensive campaign for the new BMW “X6″coupe. On one large “billboard,” there was a prompt to text message a short code to find a local dealer and test drive one. Texting the code sends you to a mobile site that offers a dealer locater . . .
The rest of this post is on Local Mobile Search.
As I said before Palore’s crawling is revealing some very interesting local datapoints. The latest is a snapshot of ad sales penetration for US IYP sites in the attorneys category (the leading revenue category in the print directory according the last data I saw).
New York
Los Angeles
What I take away from these slides is that penetration is less than 40% of the potential market and especially low in LA. These charts, if I understand them correctly, are comparing the percentage of paid advertisers to the entire database of attorneys on the directory in that city.
Thus there’s considerable opportunity to increase ad sales, especially for the online-only “agency” SEM products the IYPs are promoting. These data also show the independents such as Yodle, ReachLocal, Weblistic, Orange Soda, et al. where sales opportunities may exist.
While yellow pages has more SMB advertisers than any other single medium (3-3.2 million) it’s still a minority of all US SMBs (pick your number: 15 million, 20 million)
TV is already smarting from declining audiences and unhappy advertisers. In 2009 sets must be replaced or go digital to continue to function. The analog airwaves that TV now occupies were auctioned by the FCC to AT&T, Verizon, Direct TV and a few others for 4G networks and mobile TV.
Now US consumers will need to buy new HD ready sets or get a converter box. The NY Times provides the background and the Nielsen findings that millions of homes are unprepared:
Ten million of those homes are considered “completely unready” for the conversion, according to a report scheduled to be released Tuesday by Nielsen Media Research. Among the findings, Hispanic and African-American households stand to lose a disproportionately high share of access, and extra televisions in kitchens and bedrooms will be more likely to go dark, potentially cutting into the number of people viewing early morning and late-night television.
The survey is one of the first in-depth assessments of the nation’s readiness for the digital TV transition. In preparation for the change, the government and the broadcast industry are running a $1 billion consumer education campaign, including commercials that have started to become almost intrusive to people who watch television regularly.
So a move that was supposed to be about improved content and options for TV viewers instead becomes a dangerous juncture where millions of viewers may be lost to TV. Thus managing that transition becomes not just about “public service,” but a very self-interested fight to hold on to shrinking audiences.
An article about the forthcoming development of an API at the NY Times got me thinking about whether or not it would be smart for other newspapers to follow suit. Not all newspapers have content that would be in sufficient demand to make it work. But it’s worth considering.
Local sites, developers and verticals could take newspaper content (to varying degrees) and, to use the tired phrase, mash it up. Consumers would need to click back to the original source to get the full article or content bit in question in such a scenario. This could drive more page views, etc.
Newspapers have lots of great content that often isn’t getting the exposure it could because it has historically been buried in the newspaper site. That’s getting better lately. Making that newspaper content available to third parties seems like giving the content away but it might also be a way to reach audiences that the destination strategy alone doesn’t.
I haven’t thought it entirely through and this concept is certainly contrary to most of the newspaper work cultures out there. But there’s an interesting set of possibilities in the concept of newspaper APIs.
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Related: The WashingtonPost cut its newsroom by 10%. Earlier the parent company did something similar at Newsweek.
The Economist has a fairly bland article covering Yell and the outlook for print YP in Europe:
The problem for yellow-pages businesses in developed markets is that people are increasingly searching for local services online. A survey by the World Advertising Research Center found that in 2005, 57% of Europeans said they would turn first to the printed yellow pages when seeking goods and services. A year later that number had fallen to 51%, and 24% said they would go online, up from 20% in 2005.
Not much to say except that the Internet will capture usage and the print book will retain usage in some segments more than others.
The “agency” and “multi-platform” story is the one that the YP industry has to tell the market and its advertisers both. However, as I suggest in my previous post, the online product must evolve and splinter into a set of rich vertical directories or a broader and more “flavorful” horizontal directory — or both. The mobile product must be different still with more emphasis on personalization.
I’ve been long fascinated by what may happen once the Internet is widely accessed over TV screens. It’s definitely coming. And in the local context, we’ve seen the beginning of that with a couple of YP-related efforts from Hearst and AT&T.
Now Yahoo is apparently coming to select TV screens in Japan:
Yahoo Japan is about to launch a version of its Web portal formatted for display at 1,920 pixels by 1,080 pixels, which is the resolution of high-def TV screens. The service will initially be available through Internet-capable televisions from Sharp and was demonstrated earlier this week at a Tokyo news conference.
The “Yahoo Japan for Aquos” service is more than just a reformatted version of the main Internet site. The front page shown at the demonstration looks a lot like Yahoo did in its early days. Under the Yahoo logo, there are 12 subjects to choose from and no advertising.
The initial menu selections offer access to Yahoo’s news, weather, maps, cooking, photos, movie information, travel, games, picture books and search services, plus versions of the Yahoo Shopping and Auctions sites. The site has been designed so that it is easy to navigate using a TV remote control.
In the US, you can get YouTube on TV and Apple TV and related set-top boxes should bring the Internet into the living room. Microsoft’s Xbox should as well (I keep suggesting Virtual Earth on the Xbox would make a more compelling experience). The same would be true for Google Earth.
As the article on Yahoo, reformatted for TV, suggests you just can’t take the Internet as is and pump it onto a big screen. But TV is a much richer visual environment than the desktop and should be treated accordingly. (Conventional search, though becoming more visual is also not well suited to TV.)
It’s in this type of environment that 3D mapping interfaces may really shine. All kinds of social applications and communication (mutual, simultaneous browsing) will also be possible.
The Internet will the be the ultimate “on-demand” environment on TV.
Here are a few related stories:
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In terms of local think of this scenario, long prophesied: Viewer sees hotel featured in program, stops the video and explores the hotel and then later makes a reservation directly through TV. Same with a local restaurant upon seeing a clip of a review, discovered through a local search. Then there’s the pair of shoes that Sarah Jessica Parker was wearing, and so on. There’s an intriguing range of possibilities that I could spin out for a long time.
All the ad-targeting possibilities are there too. But in my fantasy of the future, the Internet basically “colonizes” TV; TV effectively becomes a subset of the Internet where all programming is on-demand and up against all the available Internet content. The current economic model of TV is almost totally destroyed but the consumer experience and overall TV experience is much richer.
