People – May

It has been a while since we updated our regular blog sponsored by Hawthorne Executive Search .   It is all about people in the Yellow Pages industry. If you have news you want to share about someone that is involved in the Yellow Pages industry (including retirees) that we should all know about, drop us a line and tell us how they are doing. Send your submissions to ken@yptalk.com.

Herb Gordon

The industry suffered a big loss when Herb Gordon, retired former president and CEO of the Association of Directory Marketing (ADM), passed away unexpectedly of a heart attack on Saturday, May 4, 2013.  Herb is survived by his wife, Annemarie, three sons, nine grandchildren, two sisters, and a large extended family.

Herb led ADM (which merger with what was then the Yellow Pages Association – YPA – more info) for eighteen years, retiring in June 2009, after the merger.  During his tenure, he served on the Boards of ADM, the YPA (now Local Search Association), and Association of Directory Publishers – the only person in the industry to have the unique honor of serving on all three boards.  He served at a time when the industry was just starting to experience unparalleled change.

For more go to our recent YP Talk article by clicking here.

 

Jeff Hoyer

Local Market Launch, the Santa Barbara-based startup that is driving new standards of quality and service in local presence solutions for national brands, multi-location businesses and SMBs, announced today that Jeff Hoyer has joined the company as Vice President of Sales. He will lead the company’s sales efforts, with a focus on channel partner development among local media companies, including directory publishers, newspaper publishers and broadcast companies, as well as digital media agencies and certified marketing representatives (CMRs).

“Jeff will be a tremendous asset as we continue to grow our channel partner network,” said Brian Coryat, founder and CEO, Local Market Launch. “His deep expertise and proven track record in the directory publishing, business listings management and SMB digital marketing space make him a valuable addition to our leadership team.”

Hoyer is a local media solutions veteran with significant experience in executive management, sales strategy and execution, online marketing, SEM/SEO, advertising sales, customer and client relationship management and leadership development.

“Accurate business listings data is the foundation of today’s local digital economy, as consumers increasingly engage with local businesses through social networks and mobile devices,” said Hoyer. “Helping local businesses, national brands targeting locally and multi-location businesses manage their listings data efficiently and effectively has to be an essential element of any local media company’s digital marketing solution set. Local Market Launch has developed a solution that is truly ahead of anything currently on the market in terms of data quality, focus on the customer experience and ease of ongoing management. I am excited for the opportunity to bring it to the marketplace.”

Prior to joining Local Market Launch, Hoyer was SVP, Sales & Marketing at Name Dynamics/Universal Business Listing. He also served as VP, National Sales for R.H. Donnelley/Dex Media, where he managed a national team of 30, with P&L responsibility of $420 million in print, online and PPC products. Previously he was Group VP, TMP Worldwide, managing four VP/GMs and a portfolio of national clients.

 

Richard Wall

Dex Media’s Richard Wall, Vice president for Enterprise Application Engineering has been named “One to Watch” by CIO Magazine.

The CIO Executive Council’s annual Ones to Watch award identifies the rising stars in IT. To be honored, these future CIOs must have demonstrated leadership, driven innovation and delivered value to their business.

Wall has led organizations within IT at many companies and has experience across several disciplines including architecture, development, production support, and quality assurance. He is responsible for application development and maintenance activities at Dex Media, including all applications supporting Lead to Cash processes, mobile and online applications and websites representing Superpages.com, search platforms and traffic distribution integration to search partners, customer portal, and Business Intelligence Systems (BIS) applications

 

Bill Dinan:

Telmetrics’ President  and LSA Board Chairman Bill Dinan is scheduled to speak at SMX London on Mobile Search Best Practices.

With mobile advertising spend continuing to increase, leading call measurement provider Telmetrics announced that Bill Dinan, president of Telmetrics, was scheduled to speak at SMX London on the “Paid Search Advertising in a Multi-Device World” panel.   SMX London is a premiere U.K. event for search marketing and other online advertising professionals.

Dinan will address mobile search best practices including tailoring and localizing ads to incorporate mobile consumers’ category-specific usage patterns and preferences. The presentation will include insights from the recent xAd-Telmetrics U.K. Mobile Path-to-Purchase Study, which was based on an online survey of 1,500 U.K. smartphone and tablet users conducted by Nielsen.

 

 

Say Hello to Local Market Launch

I recently ran an article that “Mom & Pop Are Still Not Advertising Online”, and I think I figured out why. Two reasons actually:

1) It’s not easy. The Internet is a big, wide open, complex, even formidable space with lots of moving parts. There’s search portals, social media, hyperlocal directories, niche sites, IYP’s and on and on. Even geeks really into this stuff have trouble keeping up. And then throw mobile on top and you have a real mess to navigate.

2) It can be very expensive. One SMB showed me a recent proposal he got that would cost him several thousand dollars for something he wasn’t sure he could even get a decent ROI on.

So naturally, many small business owners are reluctant and unsure on who to trust and how to proceed. We think we may have found just the solution for this dilemma, a new supplier for the Yellow Pages industry – Local Market Launch.

Background
The beginnings of this new industry entry are classical Yellow Pages start-up type stories. Brian Coryat, the company’s Founder & Chief Executive Officer, launched his first internet directory listing service back in 1995 — AAA Internet Promotions. After that he moved on to Web-Ignite, one of the first SEO companies, but is best known for founding and taking public the online advertising company ValueClick, for which he was awarded the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2000 for eCommerce.

After moving on from ValueClick, Brian decided to try something different and acquired a small hotel in Wisconsin. When the economy sputtered he began looking at every nickel being spent and noticed a line entry for $700 per month which he later identify was yellow page advertising. Determined to grow his struggling hotel identity beyond just the local print directory, he began the process that every SMB goes through trying to establish a consistent identity across the Internet. It was during that period that he realized that if an experienced industry professional like himself was having such problems, imagine what the less knowledgeable SMB owners were going through. So about 18 months ago he started Local Market Launch headquartered in the heart of beautiful downtown Santa Barbara, California.

Recently the company has announced another important hire in bringing on 20+ year Yellow Pages industry veteran Jeff Hoyer.  Jeff brings background as the former VP, National Sales for R.H. Donnelley/Dex Media, (managed a national team of 30, with P&L responsibility of $420 million in print, online and PPC products), and he was also Group VP at TMP Worldwide where he managed four VP/GMs and a portfolio of national clients.

Value Proposition:
Hoyer was able to give us some insight as to the value Local Market Launch can bring to both Yellow Page publishers and CMR’s. Basically the company performs three critical functions:

1. Business Listings Management (BLM): They work with SMB’s to develop a business profile, highly customized to their local market, validate and enhance the client data to ensure a standard, quality listing. That profile is then optimized across top 30 search, social & directory sites, sites such as FaceBook, Yelp, Foursquare, Google+, Bing Local, City Search, and Merchant Circle. Once the business profile has been established they then push that information across the net syndicating it to over 150 search portals building the SMB’s brand presence consistently, uniformly.
2. Local Search Optimization (LSO): After the initial stages of BLM, they come back every month, analyze the business’s top competitors and build citations based on where those competitors have business profiles.
3. Ongoing Reputation Monitoring (RM): Here they provide interactive agencies, publishers, CMR, national brands, and even those mom & pop SMB’s a dashboard which allows them to break down usage and viewing results of their business’s reputation and social web presence in any number of sorts such as division, zone, etc, and receive daily report cards

When I questioned Hoyer about what a typical average cost that an SMB would expect to see for this type service, he indicated that they are targeting a $600 first year price point. But it doesn’t end there.

Given the swift growth of mobile Local Market Launch is not limited to just working on solutions for the Internet. To provide a similar, consistent profile on mobile platforms, the company helps develop individual business landing pages which are completely mobile optimized, and then spreads that profile across the internet.

What I think will make this company very different from other providers is its agency friendly business model. The dashboards discussed above are customized for each agency. The company also has no plans to establish a direct relationship with SMB’s. They expect that publishers and CMR’s will be able to take their core product and white label it with their own brands. Under Hoyer’s guidance the company has already begun testing with a “large-scale” publisher.

The company currently has about 20 people and is beginning to rapidly hire in the Santa Barbara area. Of note is that none of the work they do is being done by offshore workers. Everything is being done right here in the good old USA.

LML Will Be at LSA:
Hoyer revealed that the company will be making a big splash at the upcoming Local Search Association conference in Las Vegas April 13-16. The company is planning a wine tasting event in their private suite and he hinted at a drawing for a weekend on the company in Santa Barbara, possibly in a private yacht. Companies interested in meeting with Local Market Launch (or to do the wine tasting) should contact Jeff at mailto:Jeff@localmarketlaunch.com or via his office line of 805-960-5572.

 

Partner With Local Market Launch
If you are an agency, marketing firm, media publisher, Internet directory or an organization that reaches local businesses, consider partnering with us today.

• White-glove, dedicated specialists for each client account
• Single point of contact for each partner project
• Scalable and effective
• Easy to integrate tools for resellers
• Revenue sharing for the life of the client
• Custom campaign capabilities

Need more information? Give us a call at (800) 720-3291 or email partners@localmarketlaunch.com.