Doing the job I do I get to attend quite a few conferences. Some are very tech oriented with an average attendee age of about 12 with body piercings mandatory, others are more marketing focused, but Kelsey gets the prize for the best food and the most suits. DMS ’09 happened last week in Orlando and we may have been the only group of people wearing jackets within a twenty mile radius.

It was a fascinating conference, I’ll admit that hour after hour focused on trends and solutions for the emerging online side of the Yellow Pages industry isn’t everyone’s idea of a fun couple of days…but I was transfixed. To appreciate the magnitude of the challenge faced by this industry you only need to look at the massive losses and bankruptcies that litter this industry. They have been hit by the perfect storm of market changes, technology advances and economic decline. The days when local businesses bought yellow page print advertising automatically are long gone golden age. The Yellow Page Behemoths are surrounded and confounded by emerging online competitors who don’t have to kill trees to reach customers. Advertisers are becoming focused on one thing and one thing alone…results. To be specific in tough economic times where every advertising dollar is carefully scrutinized they want leads.

Several interesting threads emerged from the conference worth considering in more detail.

* Competition between YP providers is hurting themselves more than anyone else. They had better start hanging together or they will be hung separately.
* Their single strongest surviving asset is the relationship they enjoy with their advertisers through their sales force…and a sales force is essential to work with local businesses.
* Their role is changing, to survive the storm they must become consultative partners for local businesses delivering the leads their advertisers need across all sources.

Perhaps the best summary of where the industry is headed articulated the need as follows.

The winners in the current battle will be those who can provide the following

1. Presence, all the things needed to ensure that the advertiser has an accurate persistent presence both online and offline on a low fixed price basis.
2. Performance, the ability for a business to get more leads to meet their needs on a performance basis such as Pay Per Click or Pay Per Call.
3. Permanence, the ability to provide to advertisers with tools to strengthen the relationship which advertisers have with their customers; social media, blogs and tools like linked in are examples of this.

The good news from our point of view is that we are already delivering on all three of these approaches. We have more to do no doubt, but it was encouraging to see that we are moving in the right direction.