We gathered for a lively reception last evening to announce the winners of our 2013 Industry Excellence Awards. The annual awards recognize local search publishers, agencies and suppliers for outstanding achievements in the local advertising business.
Our 2013 winners developed cutting-edge campaigns in mobile, search marketing, social marketing, innovation and community service that enhanced the ways the local search industry serves its clients, consumers and communities.
Our team did a great job pulling together a classic black & white silent movie, “A Night in Black in White,” to announce this year’s winners! It’s really great – you can view it here.
Here is the full list of 2013 Industry Excellence Awards winners:
According to a press release on Yellow Media’s website, the Board of Directors and Marc Tellier have collectively agreed that Tellier will be leaving the position of President and Chief Executive Officer.
“We thank Marc for his leadership and many years of devoted service to Yellow Pages Group and his agreement to remain in order to assist in effecting a smooth transition,” said Robert MacLellan, Chairman of the Board.
The board has created a search committee responsible for finding Tellier’s successor. Tellier will support the transition process and will remain CEO until August 15, 2013 or when a replacement is selected.
In addition to all the great speakers and workshops, our conference is a great opportunity to network with decision makers from some of the most influential companies in local search. We offer a variety of networking events ranging from formal, informal and everything in between. The events planned are as follows:
Conference Golf Tournament (Sunday, April 14)
Sponsored by Yellow Pages Group This year’s conference golf tournament will be held at the beautiful Arroyo Golf Club nestled alongside the breathtaking Red Rock Canyon in Las Vegas. Make some new connections and enjoy a nice relaxing round of golf on a course designed by Arnold Palmer himself. For just $250, you get 18 holes of golf, breakfast, transportation from the hotel and a chance to win some great prizes! You can sign up for golf when you register for our conference.
Women’s Round Table Event (Sunday, April 14) Sponsored by Ponytale Talk and Global Business Therapy Come and hear from Kimberli Lewis, President of the European Association of Data Base, Search and Directory Publishers (EASDP), for her talk titled, “10 Problems Women Face in the Workplace and their Similarity to Hot Dogs.” Yes, we know it sounds strange, but Kimberli offers some great insight into the topic.
Night in Black and White (Sunday, April 14)
Sponsored by YP Join us for a “Night in Black and White” as we honor the most innovative and creative work in local search during the Industry Excellence Awards. Watch a brief silent film that highlights all of our winners and stick around for drinks and networking after the show. (black & white business casual attire)
Viva Las Local Cocktail Party (Monday, April 15) Sponsored by Local Market Launch Before the “Viva Las Local” dinner, join us for cocktail hour just above the casino floor on the mezzanine level. This casual setting is a great opportunity to unwind after a packed day of great speakers and presentations. Talk business or anything but, and make some connections that are sure to continue after conference.
Viva Las Local Dinner (Monday, April 15) Sponsored by SuperMedia – Celebrity look-alikes sponsored by hibu
After cocktail hour, the party continues during the “Viva Las Local” dinner. Join us for food and drinks at The London Club. And Vegas just wouldn’t be Vegas without some celebrities. Get pictures with some special guests and take advantage of even more opportunities to network.
The speakers and panelists coming to our 2013 “Search Starts Here” Conference in Las Vegas include experts, veterans and thought leaders from all areas of the local search space. The biggest names in digital, mobile, social and print media will discuss many strategic and tactical topics that are driving the local search industry forward.
In addition to the great keynote speakers from Solocal Group (formerly PagesJaunes Groupe), Facebook and CityGrid, here are some more exciting subjects and speakers you can’t afford to miss:
SMB State of the Union Greg Sterling (Opus Research) Neal Polachek (Industry Observer)
Making Transformation Happen Paul Plant (Radicle Consulting)
What’s Working in Mobile Tim Garcia (Moasis)
Dan Hight (xAd)
Tae Kim (Google)
Michael Rubin (YP)
State of the Industry Bill Dinan (Telmetrics)
Neg Norton (Local Search Association)
Print Directories in a Multi-Platform World Matt Centofanti (YP)
Eric Webb (Marquette Group)
Dave Wolf (Linkmedia 360)
Emil Morales (TNS)
Sales Differentiation in a HYPER Competitive Selling Environment Bob Sanders (AXIOM)
Building the “Local Commerce Operating System” Ethan Anderson (MyTime)
Dave Gilbertson (Constant Contact)
Sean Harper (Groupon)
Bob Gregerson (hibu)
Finally, as announced earlier, we also have some great workshops and breakout sessions with Yelp, Yext, edō, Supermedia and many more.
Canada’s Yellow Pages Group was just named one of the top employers in Canada for the seventh consecutive year. ‘Canada’s Top 100 Employers’ is an annual list that seeks out the best places to work in the country and recognizing those companies that are leaders in attracting and retaining employees in their respective industries.
Yellow Pages Group was honored for encouraging fitness and health among employees, supporting more sustainable commuting through bike and carpool programs, and providing onsite child care options for parents.
Congratulations to the entire team at YPG for this great honor!
The new concept focuses on the user’s geographic location and life needs, all within the context of local search. Now Canpages.ca users will benefit from a search by distance experience to save time and money while shopping locally.
As part of the launch of the new concept, YPG advertisers will gain additional visibility for free on Canpages.com.
Check out the press release here for more information and visit Canpages.ca to see for yourself!
Yesterday evening, we kicked off our annual conference, “Search Starts Here,” in Boca Raton with the Local Search Association’s highly anticipated Industry Excellence Awards to recognize local search publishers, marketers and suppliers for outstanding achievements in the local advertising business.
I was particularly impressed with this year’s lineup of winners who demonstrated great leadership through innovative programs that delivered strong and measureable results for their local business customers. Through initiatives ranging from mobile sponsorship placements to call tracking programs and CSR partnerships, these colleagues and peers took our industry to the next level of success. We were honored to award each of them for positively advancing, expanding and evolving the local search space in ways that benefit both our industry and its clients.
Local Search Association National Marketing Division 2011 Publisher Partnership Award– Ogden Directories: Multi-market, multi-media advertising campaign that promoted print, online and mobile Yellow Pages offerings
Local Search Association National Marketing Division 2011 Publisher Partnership Award–Yellowbook: Initiative that helped advertisers complement print Yellow Pages campaigns with successful online programs
Mobile Platform or New App Gold Award Winner – Yellow Pages Group: YPG Mobile Sponsored Placement – YP.ca Local Search Placement Product
Mobile Platform or New App Gold Award Winner – KDA Group: National and Local Mobile Campaign to Complement DIRECTV’s Print and Internet Yellow Pages Brand
Mobile Platform or New App Gold Award Winner – Telmetrics: Telmetrics m.Call: Mobile Call Tracking 2.0
Search Marketing Value Story Gold Award Winner – Dex One: Dex Guaranteed Actions Program
Search Marketing Value Story Gold Award Winner – Wahlstrom Group: The Home Depot & Wahlstrom Channeling Internet Yellow Pages for Localized Lead Generation
Search Marketing Gold Award Winner – SuperMedia: SocialEze
Community Service Gold Award Winner – KDA Group: Integrated PSA Campaign on Behalf of VCA Animal Hospitals to Promote Benefits of Pet Adoption
Most Innovative Program Gold Award Winner – Yellow Pages Group: MarketProfiler™
Supplier of the Year Gold Award Winner – Telmetrics
Please join me in congratulating this year’s winners!
Canada’s Yellow Pages Group is debuting a redesigned YellowAPI.com website for the company’s popular public application programming interface (API), which has enrolled more than 1,700 software developers since its launch in late 2010. The tool, which features YPG’s business database of 1.5 million business listings, has sparked the creation of 35 innovative web and mobile applications. One great example is Yellow Pages TV, a new application that allows viewers to access, share and map business listings on their television. Additionally, YPG is starting a new API Fanboy blog focused on fostering stronger relationships with the developer community to help developers reach their innovation potential.
Twitter announced that a select group of small businesses can begin using its self-service advertising platform to share promoted tweets and create promoted accounts. The self-service platform, which Twitter developed with American Express, will initially include a $100 credit offering for free advertising to the first 10,000 businesses that are either American Express merchants or cardholders. Promoted accounts suggest a brand’s Twitter account to users who it believes might be interested in the brand, while promoted tweets leverage tweets that generate significant activity and highlights them in search results. Small businesses pay a fee when users follow their account or engage with their promoted tweet.
Google is testing an extension of its Google Offers program, called “Google Offers with Rewards,” which enables consumers who register their credit card and then use it during their purchase to receive automatic rewards at participating local businesses. The program is designed to provide a more comprehensive approach to offline purchase tracking as a means of helping connect the dots between online ads and offline transactions. Google Offers with Rewards will initially be available to customers who previously purchased Google Offers from a list of Bay Area businesses.
Launched in 2011, the Yellow Pages 360 Solution is a complete one-stop-shop for Canadian small- and medium-sized businesses’ local marketing needs. The site offers a full suite of tools and services including online, mobile and print advertising, as well as search engine marketing and optimization and website creation and management. Additionally, local businesses can take advantage of a variety of free tools and seminars on the site to develop a better understanding of the advertising options available to them.
Please join me in congratulating Yellow Pages Group on a job well done! We look forward to the company’s continued progress in creating next generation local advertising solutions for its customers.
Yellow Pages Group announced today a major overhaul of its RedFlagDeals.com brand, one of the leading providers of online promotions and shopping tools in Canada.
According to its press release, the 11-year-old brand is kicking off the holiday season with “a brand new site redesign, a new image and revamped mobile application showcasing one of the largest deals database in Canada.” The revamp also includes a new modernized logo and tagline, “Where Canadians Save.”
The upgraded RedFlagDeals.com, which currently attracts 1.5 million unique monthly visitors and about 4 million shoppers during the holiday season, is faster to navigate and more streamlined and efficient. It also includes a variety of new local functions. Largely known for its national deals, users are now able to access local deals as well. Additionally, a new map feature will help users find the best deals around them based on their location.
The site’s iPhone app has also been updated to provide instant access to the latest deals and coupons based on a user’s location. Users are able to access the new “Around Me” map feature to find available deals nearby, and the Forum section, will gives bargain-hunters the ability to talk about deals.
I’m excited to see Yellow Pages Group making such significant upgrades to this site – just in time for the busy holiday season – and look forward to hearing about positive results in the near future.
Darby Sieben, director of business development, Yellow Pages Group in Canada, discussed the success of Yellow API, YPG’s application program interface launched a year ago. The tool, available to developers across platforms, provides YPG with the unique ability to stream its top Canadian local search content directly to third-party sites and applications.
Yellow API, which provides data about 1.5 million local businesses in Canada, provides benefits to four key stakeholders, according to Sieben:
Small businesses: enables additional qualified leads by extending content
Developers: creates a centralized source for local business information and allows developers to monetize the leads they generate through platforms they build
Data partnerships: partnerships with Twitter and Foursquare have synced business listings
Consumers: through data partnerships, providing consumers with new opportunities to find quality local businesses
Sieben talked about how Yellow API’s strong success to date:
1,000+ developer keys distributed
30+ applications developed
Millions of consumer searches
Now responsible for 50% of the mobile traffic YPG’s listings attract
Powers Yahoo’s mobile searches in Canada
Being used by large national brands – such as IAMs, which is streaming API data into its iPhone app
Developer program that’s attracted great new talent to the company
News apps ranging from Finish My Basement to Flushfinder that leverage API data
BIA/Kelsey’s Neal Polachek and Charles Laughlin hosted an interesting panel on the future opportunities and challenges facing traditional Yellow Pages providers, and how these companies need to continue to transform their business models to embrace the fast-growing digital market.
David Sharman, senior vice president and chief strategy officer, Dex One, made clear that Dex One no longer sees itself as a Yellow Pages company, but a marketing solutions company providing commercially-oriented local search offerings to local businesses. Sharman said the good news about this transformation is that Dex One is positioned as a player in one of the hottest spaces in the investment market today. The bad news, he said, is that is one of the most competitive as well.
Scott Pomeroy, CEO, Yellow Pages Group, New Zealand, said his company has had debates about where the business is going and how they should embrace it. So far, he said, there is no concrete example of a business model that has been completely successful. Pomeroy said the industry needs to do a better job implementing a sustainable model. He said Yellow Pages Group is looking specifically at share of wallet – how quickly small businesses are shifting from print to digital – and working to provide the right product set to make the company credible in the marketplace. Our own Neg Norton stressed that in today’s increasingly digital world, print Yellow Pages still provide valuable lookups. He noted that he believes that industry’s real struggle has been with sales execution.
Sharman agreed that print still has a lot more life in it and remains attractive – and that his company continues to explore creative ways to extend the medium. He said that local businesses are simply interested in ways to drive leads – so whether that comes from print or digital isn’t an issue to them. He said his company’s salespeople today help determine the combination of print and digital that makes sense for each of their customers.
The panel also spent time talking about the best business strategy for traditional Yellow Pages companies in today’s world – and the pros and cons of creating standalone digital businesses as opposed to today’s integrated print-digital businesses. Sharman said that the capital structure and cultures of the traditional Yellow Pages providers makes it difficult to build out digital offerings and attract the right workforce. Pomeroy built on that by noting that the Yellow Pages company culture was a major constraint to growth – and that publishers felt entitlement given decades of high margins and low competition. He said the industry needs to adopt a more customer-centric and fluid culture in order to be successful.
The remainder of the panel focused on other segments like mobile, and the importance of traditional Yellow Pages driving digital growth through partnerships with more specialized companies with distinct offerings as opposed to creating their own from scratch.
Many of us watched with great interest last year when Google tried to acquire Groupon, the popular daily deals site. After that deal didn’t move forward, Google created its own location-based daily deals service, Google Offers, which beta launched in April.
This week, Google is taking its daily deals efforts to the next level with its widely-reported acquisition of The Dealmap, a start-up that aggregates discounts from about 450 daily deals sites, organizes them by location, and displays them for users on its website and mobile app. Since it launched in May 2010, The Dealmap has racked up an impressive user count of more than two million.
Our industry isn’t indulging in speculation, but basing their strategies on sound research. Our latest State of Local Search study found that daily deals yield extremely high levels of satisfaction and repeat customers.
We’ll all be keeping a close eye on how this exciting segment of our business continues to evolve.
We’re continuing our series today on what Yellow Pages companies are doing to make a difference on the environmental and consumer choice fronts by taking a look at Canada’s Yellow Pages Group.
YPG has launched several initiatives in these areas, including:
Allowing residents to easily remove their names from the print directory delivery list via the Customer Delivery Program. Residents can opt-out online at www.ypg.com/delivery or by contacting Distribution Services at 1-800-268-5637.
Issuing press releases in local communities prior to delivering directories, informing residents about their option to opt-out and encouraging them to recycle old directories.
Including an ecoGuide™ at the beginning of each print directory that includes a wide variety of local information and practical tools designed to help Canadians lead greener and more eco-responsible lives.
Regularly encouraging waste reduction and recycling efforts across Canada by working with provincial recycling councils nationwide to remind Canadians to recycle their old directories once new ones arrive.
Providing background on the company’s environmental commitment and related key milestones via a dedicated website, www.ypg.com/enviornment.
Additionally, through several initiatives, YPG has reduced its usage of paper by 25% over the past two years. The company’s residential white pages deliveries—which have very different usage than Yellow Pages or business listings— are now delivered on-demand in Canada’s eight largest markets.
For more information on the industry’s collective efforts, read our 2011 Sustainability Report. And check back here as we continue our series on what Yellow Pages companies are doing to proactively address environmental and consumer choice concerns.
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