Record Online Ad Spend & The Death of Yellow Pages Advertising
November 14th, 2007 by Megan Mahan
Yesterday afternoon as I filled up my coffee cup, a colleague said to me: “You won’t believe what I was on my doorstep when I got home yesterday. Another phone book. For the third time this year!”
The conversation grew to include four people and I listened as each of them complained about the frequency of deliveries, the bulk of each new phone book, the complete waste of paper, etc. Soon, the conversation turned to our customers–insurance agents–and why many of them were still wasting money on Yellow Pages ads.
“We use the internet to find everything,” one colleague said. “And who’s going to pick a random insurance agent out of the phonebook and give them their business? Whenever I’ve moved, I’ve asked for agent referrals from friends and coworkers.”
She’s right. So why are insurance agents still dumping money into the Yellow Pages? As far as I can tell, it’s out of habit. It’s been done for years and years and, come on, it’s not that expensive.
But how many businesspeople–especially small business owners–are cool with dumping money into poor-performing, zero ROI-bringing prospecting methods? Probably not many. And if Yellow Pages advertising falls into that category for you, you’ve got to ax it.
The fact of the matter is that web prospecting is where it’s at. And we’ve got the facts to back this. On Monday, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) in conjunction with PricewaterhouseCoopers announced that online ad spend had hit a new high in Q3 of 2007–bringing total ad spend in the first nine months of the year to a whopping $15.2 billion.
Says an exec at IAB,
The continued robust growth of the industry indicates that marketers increasingly understand and appreciate the benefits of interactive advertising. Marketers large and small have come to accept digital media as the fulcrum of any marketing strategy.
But this probably isn’t news to you. So the big question is: how can we help you better incorporate the web into your business/marketing practices? How can we address your pain points?
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