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As senior director for advertising strategy, Ingrid Michelsen oversees online ad products, custom creative solutions, and sales development for WhitePages, Inc., the leading source for free contact information online. Prior to WhitePages Ingrid was an Account Director at Avenue-A | Razorfish managing digital marketing initiatives for MSN, Netflix and Countrywide Financial. With over 14 years' experience in online media, Ingrid has worked primarily on the media side as Global Director, Advertising Strategy and Operations for Reuters.com, Executive Producer, Internet Initiatives for Institutional Investor, Inc. and Sr. Strategy Consultant for E.W. Scripps and News Corp while at Xceed, a Web design and development firm specializing in online publisher monetization solutions.

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New Directions for Directories

Written on
Dec 23, 2009 
Author
Ingrid Michelsen  |
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New Directions for Directories

sign_small.jpgADOTAS – Everybody’s buzzing about (and grateful for) the surge in online shopping this holiday season. Total e-commerce revenue is up, people are responding to free shipping promotions and retailers are ever more aware of the importance of marketing their down-market promotions in the place people spend most of their precious time: online.

Because e-commerce sites don’t offer much in the way of display advertising opportunities, it seems that most holiday display ad dollars land in the laps of portals and generic high reach networks. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach (as long as you have a huge budget in order to stand out), but massive reach isn’t the only way to go. There’s actually an entire (lesser known) category that delivers highly concentrated audiences of active shoppers and organizers during the holiday season — directory sites.

As you likely know, one of the most time consuming holiday activities of all isn’t actually shopping — it’s looking up physical addresses to mail (yes, mail) holiday cards and to find accurate shipping addresses when shopping online.

Where do you go when you need Aunt Rose’s zip code when you’re just about to finish ordering a wreath on 1-800-Flowers? How can you confirm the spelling of your neighbors’ names so you can drop off tins of Chex Mix? Where do you look for the nearest midnight mass in your in-laws’ neighborhood? Directory websites and their free mobile applications.

WhitePages and other directory sites see a major traffic spike every holiday season (close to 20% for WhitePages.com, specifically) and so far this year is no different. But we know what everyone is thinking: How long could that last with email, cell phones and all those social networking sites taking over all types of communication?

To answer that question (and for our own product development plans) WhitePages and Market Decisions conducted an Internet-wide survey to understand how people prefer to arrange parties, send holiday cards, give gifts and manage all sorts of other activities during holiday seasons as well as during major life stages and events (such as weddings, having a baby and starting a new business).

It turns out, surprisingly, that across all age groups most people still prefer to mail real cards during the holidays. Even when asked what they predict will be the case in five years the numbers weren’t all that different (though you do see an uptick in using social networking sites to send holiday greetings):

chart_1_mail_email_sn.JPG

For media planning and buying purposes it’s worth noting that holiday season communications methods do differ slightly (and predictably) between age groups:

chart_2_mail_email_sn_age-breakout.JPG

It’s clear that people still need physical address information during the holidays and during major life events, but directory sites aren’t sitting on their laurels. We’re fully aware that landline phone usage has decreased significantly, and home address information will become increasingly harder to source and less useful to people.

To address this trend, WhitePages has been building an opt-in database of privacy-protected email and cell phone listings as well as recently incorporated social network listings to make sure that we remain relevant in the coming years.

In addition to reaching a large number of holiday card and package senders, business directories also present the ability to reach holiday shoppers and through proprietary behavioral targeting that allows advertisers to narrow their audience down to people searching specifically for their stores or product types (e.g., auto dealership searchers, heavy superstore searchers, etc.) This, combined with product innovation, is how we stay relevant beyond our peak season.


Percent of Respondents Who Said They Use the Following Directory Sites:

chart_3_directory-site-rankings.JPG

With the end of the holiday advertising season upon us, I’ll just wish you a very happy and healthy post marketing, real-world holiday season with your families and friends, and I’ll just look forward to hearing from you in 2010.






Reader Comments.

great article, and very true. i have to say as a “real” person outside of my marketing job, i use whitepages at least weekly to look up friends and family, not only during the holidays. i would think based on some stereotypes (albeit, still true!), you also have a high % of women shoppers that are in charge of gift giving throughout the year for their households.

Posted by erika | 2:02 pm on December 23, 2009.

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