Yesterday, Chris Cummings,Yellow Pages Association chair and Marquette Group CEO, accepted our invitation to deliver a featured presentation at Directional Media Strategies ‘09. He will speak on the event’s opening day, Sept. 22.
Cummings joins a powerful list of directory company CEOs who will address DMS, which for the first time is being co-presented by the YPA. Joining Cummings as featured speakers are Frank Jules, president and CEO, AT&T Advertising Solutions; Donat Retif, CEO of Truvo; and Dave Swanson, chairman and CEO of R.H. Donnelley.
Cummings is a longstanding industry leader from the national side of the business. He is the first CMR ever to serve as the association’s chair. He can offer a view of the industry today from the …

Three CEOs who together represent almost 30 percent of global directional media revenues will give featured presentations at The Kelsey Group’s Directional Media Strategies, Sept. 22-24, in Orlando, Florida.
Dave Swanson, chairman and CEO of R.H. Donnelley, will deliver the featured presentation on the event’s second day. RHD has experienced all the ups and downs that the era of publicly traded directory companies has had to offer. I’m interested in hearing Swanson’s take on the way forward for RHD and Yellow Pages industry.
Donat Retif, CEO of Truvo, a European directory publisher with operations in Belgium, Ireland, Portugal and Romania, will talk about his company’s aggressive efforts to migrate the business from a subscription based business model to one that is largely …

Recommendations, Strategies and How to Implement New Plans to Grow Your Business
BIA Advisory Services along with its The Kelsey Group division featured over 30 speakers at the “Winning Media Strategies 2009” conference held, May 20-22 2009 in Washington D.C.
For those of you who missed the event, it is available on-demand. Speakers covered a range of topics all on the theme of how traditional media should transform their business models to address cyclical and secular changes in the media ecosystem. To be competitive, traditional media companies must become very focused on seeing and understanding the implications of fast evolving audience and advertiser attitudes and behaviors. Companies must redefine themselves as multiplatform media services.
While we cannot do justice to the richness …

Last week at the Winning Media Strategies conference, AOL’s Platform-A called out the imbalance of supply and demand that currently exists in online display advertising.
With respect to ad impressions, the supply side has exploded in the past few years with the changing ways that people are interacting with online media. The increase in page views from things like social networking, for example, has created a glut of inventory.
The lowered barriers to online interactive services that are at the heart of Web 2.0 have likewise flooded, and fragmented, the market. We no longer see consolidation of traffic on major sites to the degree that we used to. The question then becomes, how do you maximize revenues during all these transitions?
Lynda Clarizio, …

Posted by: David Oxenford
Partner at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP
E-mail: DavidOxenford@dwt.com
Original Blog Post: Broadcast Law Blog
This past week, I attended the BIAfn Winning Media Strategies Conference in Washington, DC. During the course of the conference, there was much talk about how broadcasters and publishers need to provide unique service to their communities in order to survive in the competitive media marketplace. The point was made over and over again that, in each market there are unique attributes and personalities that a station should be covering in its programming, and should be exploiting even more broadly through their digital assets, to tie it to its community. Only by doing so will the station be able to survive in the …

Posted by: Peter Krasilovsky
Vice President, Program Director, Marketplaces
Local advertisers speaking at WMS ’09 in Washington, D.C., this morning had plenty to say about how they perceive their choices in advertising, online and off.
Dianne Bonanno, senior manager, marketing communications, The Graduate School, said that her adult education company is doing good business. “In a downturn, people invest in themselves and institutions,” she noted.
Advertising-wise, things are changing quickly, as the company seeks to attract decision makers at companies who pay for their employees’ tuition, as well as open enrollment students who are paying for themselves. “We were a lot in print, but as a national institution, we have moved to a lot of online. We’ve added social media, too. It doesn’t cost …

Posted by: Peter Krasilovsky
Vice President, Program Director of Marketplaces
Radio and TV station executives and industry groups are seeking to get chips inserted into mobile handsets to extend the reach of their respective programming. And they may do it with federal help as a public safety issue.
Emmis Communications President and CEO Jeff Smulyan, speaking at WMS ’09 in Washington D.C. said radio chips beat cell towers in cases of emergency communications, and can be put into every mobile phone for 50 cents or less – a message he had just been pushing in a day of lobbying on Capitol Hill. The entire installation would be just $1-2 per phone.
“Cell systems jam,” said Smulyan. “They’re only geared to take calls …

Posted by: Peter Krasilovsky
Vice President, Program Director of Marketplaces
As more and more digital products and partnerships are introduced, a real debate is emerging whether they can be sold by a traditional media sales type who may be more focused on core product, have limited time to make his or her case (and apparently, a “C student” as well).
WMS ’09 participants in Washington D.C. this week got their fill of the debate. Gordon Borrell of Borrell Associates is clearly of the school that Internet specialists have to be hired. “If you are developing interactive, you can’t do it without sales people,” he says, encouraging the broadcasters in the audience to budget for more feet in the street, even in these tough …