Loading ...« Local Ad Estimates on the Upswing | Home | People are Smarter Than Computers (Part 3) »
The Death of The Book Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
By Scott Finholm | December 14, 2007
I’m sure many of you have read the Bill Gates quote from earlier this year predicting that yellow page usage by people under 50 will drop to near zero over the next five years (you can read the interview here , the actual quote is about 3/4ths of the way down the page). Was Bill saying something that we all already knew? My wife uses the term “a focus group of one” when referring to her own behavior and preferences with regards to a situation or product. In the case of our home, our “focus group of two” doesn’t own a yellow pages book; we get our local business information from our laptops, home desktop or Web-enabled phones. But I wouldn’t pretend to think that we represent how the average person finds local business information.
What I find interesting about the book is that it’s been essentially unchanged for 100 years. The offices of our newly-acquired call tracking company, VoiceStar, have an amazing selection of antique phone books in their waiting area, some only 20 pages long and some even including instructions for how to dial your phone. Flipping through them reminds you that even as ads got bigger and color was added, it’s still really just a list of local businesses. Today, the Kelsey Group blogged about some recent comments from Yellowpages.com (AT&T’s Internet arm) about the potential they see in a “three screen” (i.e. Internet, phone and TV) strategy for non-book advertising. What Peter Krasilovsky mentions is that while some other players in the space like Verizon have sold their yellow pages arm, AT&T still sees real (and increasing) value in theirs. While the revenue growth numbers that are discussed show a lot of hope for and investment in the success of non-book advertising, what’s telling is that AT&T isn’t devaluing the advertising in the book in favor of these other sources.
So why am I blogging about the book when all the discussion is around non-book users and advertisers? Because we’re starting to see the convergence of old-style book advertising and Internet-style tracking. One of the expectations advertisers have about advertising online is track-ability. Their assumption is that every query, every click and every action of every user should be tracked and reported so the advertiser can know the ROI of their efforts, what’s needed to improve their site, how they should adjust their marketing message, etc.
One of the concerns with the book is that it’s hard to quantify the ROI for advertisers. That’s where call tracking becomes valuable since the phone number is the main way book users contact the advertisers they find. If an advertiser can quantify how many calls they received from their book ad and they know roughly how much a call is worth to them, the ROI math is easy. In addition, some advertisers are using distinct Web domains published only the book so they can track the users that found their site via the yellow pages. While Web domain tracking is inherently Internet-focused, call tracking has only recently become a hot commodity because of the desire to track call volumes generated on the Internet. Now that these technologies can be used to automate daily Web- or email-based reports showing call information to the advertiser, those advertisers can really quantify how the book is performing for them.
The book is a static data source but there’s no reason why modern tracking tools can’t make it a valid part of any sophisticated, analytics-driven marketing campaign. We may be nearing a world where book and online leads can be reported in a consolidated format, with online sources supplementing book-based leads as needed to fulfill overall guaranteed leads packages sold by yellow page publishers. While Mr. Gates might end up being right about declining book usage, that doesn’t mean that the book is an irrelevant marketing tool for today’s local business.
Topics: Call Tracking, The Kelsey Group, Local Advertisers, Yellow Pages, Advertising |