AT&T CMO Ken Ray, speaking on a panel at Kelsey’s DMS 08 event this week in Atlanta, said print books have plenty of life in them but that publishers have got to work to make them relevant with “URLs, email, texting..using cell phones as a transactional device….a whole set of things we are already seeing in Europe and Japan.”
On a more basic level, the books just need to get better distributed. “Using the books is still pretty darn easy,” he said. But no one is satisfied with the way we get books into the home.
As for ad sales, Ray is among those that think that the Yellow Pages business will remain dependent on live sales reps, rather than self provisioning, which “is wildly unrealistic,” he said.
“They will tell you that they track calls, too. And they make service calls on weekends.”
The bottom line, however, is: “Do we want people to self provision higher value ads. I don’t think so,” said Ray. “Are they really going to upsell themselves? We want to be service consultants.”
The biggest part of being a “service consultant” is to bring leads to advertisers, added Ray. “I’d like to say ‘a lead is a lead. ‘Here is what it is worth.’ I don’t want to get into different components.”
I enjoyed Ken’s remarks and felt he was on point with most of them, and this comment may have been regarding aggregating the results of AT&T’s various ad products, however, I don’t know that it’s realistic to say “a lead is a lead”. My experience is that engaged small businesses independently judge the quality of their leads and appropriately (or inappropriately) form an opinion of the source against that subjective opinion. Listening to phone calls is the only true way to gauge the quality of the phone-generated leads and have a meaningful conversation with the advertiser about the results of their investment. Drawing a line at where the media’s responsibility ends and the advertiser’s takes over is a step that I submit is typically not agreed upon between sales rep and advertiser and thus divergent expectations are generated that lead to advertiser dissatisfaction and churn.
This is a very challenging intersection that all advertising channels must reconcile.
Your thoughts?
The continued growth of the internet has changed all the ground rules we once knew. Major purchases are almost entirely made through the internet. This also relates to decisions regarding legal & healthcare issues. The printed product will eventually, if not already, only have value to emergency service related companies. I spent 30 years in the directory advertising so I speak with knowlege of the issue.