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| | January 5, 2005 | Issue 1 Vol. 2 | |
| | Table of Contents
Welcome to the January edition of YP Talk, an information source serving the Yellow Pages industry.
Hopefully you all had an opportunity to enjoy the holiday season and are ready to jump back into work with the start of the New Year. In this month's issue we have tried to collect a wide array of interesting articles: - We talked with Chris Cummings, the CEO of Marquette Group and the 5th largest CMR in the industry. Chris provides several unique insights based on his 25 years of industry experience in View From The Corner Office.
- In this month's Sales & Marketing article, we take a look at how technology can bring additional value to an advertisers program.
- Several senior woman executives from the industry provide their views in the HR/Personnel article titled "Why Woman Don't Run More Companies"
- Reaching narrow target audiences is the subject of this month's Research article, courtesy of Joel Raphael from ViewPower.
- The Printing & Production article covers how a new start-up publisher in China has leveraged the Christmas season to gain market awareness. You don't want to miss this one.
- A look at the continuing desktop search tool wars is covered in the Tech Talk article.
- News U Can Use provides a collection of news items you may not have seen elsewhere.
We encourage you to share this newsletter with others. We want to hear from you about other topics we should cover (ken@yptalk.com). We especially want to hear about people in our industry - what they are up to, how they are doing (people@yptalk.com).
Special thanks go to our sponsors, whose support of this effort makes it possible. Don't forget to check out their links for more information about their products and services.
Enjoy. Learn. Prosper.
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| | The View From The Corner Office: A discussion with Chris Cummings, CEO - Marquette Group
 For this month's View From The Corner Office article, I recently talked with Chris Cummings, the CEO of Marquette Group, the fifth largest CMR in the Yellow Pages industry with over $110 Million in billings.
Chris is one of the better known leaders in the industry due in large part to his 25 years of industry experience in local sales and National Yellow Page programs, as well as his participation in numerous industry efforts as a Board Member of YPA and ADM.
Often when I interview senior level managers in this industry, I find they have been most successful at bringing together an extraordinary range of business experiences which provides them with a unique understanding of how to wrestle with the many business issues they face on a day-to-day basis. Chris is certainly no exception. His background in local sales, National sales, and marketing roles gives him a unique view of the direction he believes this industry needs to head in if it will continue to grow and prosper. He is also not a leader that is happy resting on the recent successes that have propelled Marquette's growth, as best demonstrated by the recent purchase of US Motivation.
To read the full interview, click here. 
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| | Sales & Marketing: Using Technology to Add Value for Advertisers
Ask any local sales rep about the keys to successfully selling Yellow Pages advertising and the unanimous choice is the incredible value story the media has backed by years of supporting research making it so believable, so irresistible to advertisers.
As print publishers try everything imaginable from a product and feature perspective even down to scratch and sniff ads, everyone is seeking the next new thing that will attract new advertising dollars and keep the current programs growing. IYP and search are the hot new discussion topics, but are still in their early stages.
What if a publisher could provide new product features that include: - Interactive display ads that showcase key business facts, company logos, product photos, coupons, email forms, web links, maps and more.
- Display ads integrated directly within search results, allowing consumers to make faster, better-informed purchasing decisions.
- Real-time, browser-based ad creation, editing, preview and publishing, either by the advertiser or the publisher's sales team.
- Log detailed click through information so the advertiser gets timely statistics further supporting that value story we all telling.
We think we've stumbled on to something that may just fit that order and it's brought to you by a group called IPIX AdMission.
To read the full story, click here... | |
| | HR/Personnel: Why Women Don't Run More Company's
By Ken Clark, Vice President - Hawthorne Executive Search
If you look purely at the stats, you would probably wonder why more women aren't running U.S. companies. Women hold slightly over half of all managerial and professional specialty positions in America, but only about 15.7% of corporate-officer jobs in the largest companies (up from 8.7% in 1995), and 13.6% of board directorships (up from 9.5% in 1995). They hold only 7.9% of the Fortune 500 highest titles, and represent only 5.2% of top earners.
So what's the hold up? A recent survey by Catalyst, a New York research organization surveyed 705 women and 243 men with Vice-President or higher-level jobs in large to midsize U.S. companies to learn about the differences between men and women executives, their attitudes and their work lives. The results were a little surprising: - Top women and men executives are equally ambitious and have similar job-satisfaction levels, strategies for advancement, and reasons for leaving companies.
- But the survey highlighted several key factors that negatively affect women's ability to climb the ladder, some in overt and subtle ways. Women are much more likely than men to cite cultural factors -- for instance, stereotyping of women's roles and abilities -- as obstacles to their advancement. The study also noted that men apparently aren't aware of many of the challenges their female counterparts struggle with.
We asked 25 of the top women in the Yellow Pages industry to comment on the study and whether they have encountered any of these obstacles in their careers.
For the full story, click here... | |
| | Research: Reaching Narrow Targeted Audiences
By Joel Raphael, President - ViewPower
A recent article in MediaPost by Tom Hespos addressed the difficulties faced by media planners when dealing with an opportunity to reach a narrowly targeted audience. He was particularly focused on using on-line as a medium. In the on-line world, many companies are able to address highly targeted markets.
However, most of the media planning tools used by planners and buyers focus on classic reach and frequency measures for a "broadcast" message reaching a demographic. They try to put all media on a comparable footing by converting to CPM, cost per thousand viewers/readers.
He points out that the use of demographics as a metric was simply a means to get to the targeted audience. But many clients lose sight of that and think their goal is to reach the demographic, at the lowest possible CPM. Luckily, he had a client who "got it" and understood that it was well worth paying a premium in order to reach this targeted audience.
Well, isn't that exactly the situation with Yellow Pages?
For the full story, click here... | |
| | Printing & Production: A New World Version of Public Relations
While the last of the streamers from the New Year's celebration have been cleaned up and most of you have already packed away the Christmas decorations, we thought we would share with you one more story of holiday cheer from a place you might least expect it - China.
A few weeks ago an old buddy Lyle Wolf, who is now Chairman of Yilong Media, Yilong Media Group, a new Yellow Pages start-up with its headquarters in Hangzhou (just west of Shanghai in east central China) shared with me some of their efforts to bring Yellow Pages into the mainstream of Chinese thinking. 
Lyle and his team came up with a very creative effort to introduce their new company to the area - a Christmas tree. This is one item you don't want to miss reading.
To read the full article, click here.
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| | Tech Talk: Yahoo Enters Desktop Search Race
As we have reported in prior Tech Talk articles, the fight for a share of the search market has moved from the Web page to your computer desktop. As search engines seek to build loyalty in their user base, Yahoo has joined Microsoft, Ask Jeeves, and Google by releasing their own software to comb users' computers. Yahoo hopes that when its free desktop search service becomes available in early January, it can follow its rivals in an effort to extend the reach of the highly profitable search-related advertising.
Desktop search, which helps excavate information buried on computer hard drives, is seen as the next frontier in the booming search sector that has generated billions in revenues from ads generated by Web search queries.
In this issue we toss Yahoo's new entry in the mix to see what it means to this new technology war, and why the Yellow Pages community needs to watch this carefully.
Click here for the full story... | |
| | News U can Use
New Online Local Search Guide The Yellow Pages Association (YPA), in conjunction with supporting partners' comScore, SEMPO and The Kelsey Group, have stepping in to fill an "information vacuum" by providing a central resource that captures developments within the local search community. YPA launched the Local Search Guide (www.localsearchguide.org) with an objective of providing a micro site that serves as a frequently updated "Who's Who" of the local search marketplace, complete with industry viewpoints, glossaries and other resources about the online community.
For the full press release, click here... Free Credit Reports Thanks to the Clark Howard newsletter for this item: You are now able to get your credit report once a year from each of the three credit bureaus if you live in many Western states. Better yet, it's free! Under the Fair and Accurate Credit Reporting Act, you are able to get your free reports today if you live in Hawaii, California, Alaska, Arizona, Washington, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico and Nevada. The rest of the country will be phased in over the next year, and by December 2005 every state in the country will be able to get free reports. Find out about your state at annualcreditreport.com. If you're good at details and keeping a calendar, you want to get a credit report from each bureau every four months. Your report is your financial report card and you need to review it often. You may want to pay to get your credit score along with the free report. It will tell you what kind of loans you qualify for, and that is good knowledge to have. But don't buy anything else.
Update! The day after the initiative started, credit bureau Experian announced that it would offer free reports to everyone, no matter where they live. For more information, go to freecreditreport.com. I live in North Carolina and was able to obtain mine with no problem. Clark Howard also thinks the other two bureaus will follow suit. eBay Cranks It Up Another Notch We continue to watch developments at eBay that have the potential to impact the Yellow Pages industry. Making a move into the online real estate market, San Jose, Calif.-based online auction company eBay recently announced plans to acquire Rent.com, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based Internet rental listing site, for about $415 million dollars. The acquisition, coming just four months after eBay's purchase of a 25 percent stake in the online classified service Craigslist--is expected to close in the first quarter of 2005. An eBay spokesman said the company plans to operate Rent.com as an independent entity. eBay also has classified sites in Germany, Korea, India, and the Netherlands.
As eBay continues its horizontal expansion into related content media, how far behind could a purchase in the Yellow Pages space be?
For the full story, click here! You Will Take a Vacation Next Year Over the last 20 to 30 years there has been a noticeable shift to shorter vacations. Whether it reflects work schedules and the reality of how much time people can get off, the travel industry has seen more of the four and five-day weekend type vacations than the old traditional two-week off ones that you might remember from your childhood days. Eighty-six percent of 4,000 families surveyed in a Yesawich, Pepperdine, Brown & Russell poll earlier this year said vacations of five nights or more are ideal, and more than half said seven nights or more would be ideal.
What's also changed is the gap between the vacations people take and the vacations they want. People tend to try to take several of these short trips a year as a Travel Industry of America survey found from the travel habits of 300,000 households.
So how do you realize your vacation dreams? USAToday offers a simple suggestion: Make a New Year's resolution and start planning.
For the full story, click here! Surfing the Net From Work We found this one a little hard to believe, BUT a recent BURST! Media survey found that 32.3 percent of employed men, and 24.9 percent of employed women, ages 25 to 34, say they spend three or more hours each day surfing the Web at work.
And what do these "workers" do online? Seems that the most popular Web activities are e-mail and instant messaging with over 60 percent of respondents say they have used the Web at work to connect with others. Other popular online activities at work include checking local or national news (54%), researching the weather (41%), and looking up information about products (35%).
At least for the last one, we hope they are using one of the industry's IYP sites….
For the full story, click here! | |
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