WRITTEN ON October 1st, 2009 BY chris AND STORED IN directory distribution

Tags: dms09, yellow pages

Our Operations Director, Peter Rand, has just returned from a trip to the Directional Media Strategies conference in Orlando, Florida. This annual event is a chance for the great and good of the global directories industry to discuss latest trends and developments.

Here Peter highlights some of the main points to emerge:

As forms of advertising media, print and online have generally been thought of as two very different beasts. You’re either in one camp or the other. But this division is becoming less defined. Increasingly, it is simply the idea of leads and conversions - from whatever source - that’s being used as a means of determining ROI. Whether those leads have come from search engines, print directories, mobile advertising or any other channel is less and less important.

Digital advertising spend continues to rise, but the ROI value of print remains impressive. As Donat Retif of European publisher Truvo pointed out in his presentation, print sales were down 13% in 2008 but print still accounted for 73% of total sales. He went on to claim that the print directory “will not prosper in its current form”, and that they themselves were transforming their organisation away from the traditional Yellow Pages image.

That said, print Yellow Pages still produce considerable revenue opportunities for publishers. The conference highlighted success stories such as Sensis in Australia and Homepages in the US. The latter’s CEO, Abe Andrzejewski, believes printed directories will thrive in areas not effectively served by online media, such as “geographic relevancy” that is hyperlocal, ultra-relevant and extremely cost-effective. Homepages is a good example of the kind of opportunity that exists - its success is built around local, highly targeted deliveries of around 14,000 copies, with a simple and relatively inexpensive rate card. It has been growing apace over the past 12 months, in contrast to its bulkier and less targeted competitors.

The UK is currently somewhat ahead of our American colleagues in terms of highly localised targeting. Over here, we are already targeting by specific postcode (around 15 homes) and are thus able to facilitate the delivery of extremely relevant printed material. The next big advance will relate to the “back end” delivery operations of printed directories. If they can feed into the publisher’s own systems, producing real-time delivery progress updates and other salient information about demographics and geography, then a salesforce, customer service and even end customer will all benefit enormously.

We’re not far off the latter development - in fact, we should begin to see some UK-based data streams by next year’s DMS conference. When in place, its tangibly improved measurability will provide further evidence of the staying power of print delivery, even in a digital world.