Kelsey: You’ll Still Have Yellow Pages To Kick Around Some More
eMarketer discusses “hidden trends of 2008,” while offering proprietary data.
What happens when the self-declared “leading provider of strategic research and analysis, data and competitive metrics on Yellow Pages,” starts the new year by issuing a Press Release hailing “a profound shift” in print Yellow Pages spend without providing data to back up the provocative “prediction”?
Media reaction to the Kelsey Group’s formal announcement of its analysts’ educated guesses for 2008 could be 1) Discussion of anecdotal insights, 2) Dismissal of unsubstantiated projections, 3) Request for Kelsey clarification or 4) Unquestioning acceptance of New Year musings as fact.
Here at Insider Chatter, I proceeded with reaction number three: I immediately asked Kelsey to “explain/expound/backup” its cavalier, unsubstaniated “prediction” of “big increases in local search inventory.”
In typical blogosphere fashion, however, a typical media reaction was to pounce on another opportunity to giddily regurgitate a trendy ”Yellow Pages are toast” meme. So much so, apparently, that Kelsey itself deemed it prudent to issue its version of a Yellow Pages clarification.
I look forward to Kelsey’s “clarification” of its far reaching local search “prediction.”
The questions that I pose in response to Kelsey’s declaration that “big increases in local search inventory” are on the 2008 horizon are: Why “big increases”? How “big increases”? Where “big increases”? Who benefits from the “big increases”? Does any data back up the specific prediction, or is it a gut call?
For now, Kelsey advises it is “in the process of updating its annual revenue and usage forecast for global Yellow Pages and local search, which will project out five years.”
YAY? NO! Kelsey will “release the document” to “TKG clients in mid first quarter,” signaling “at which time our forecast figures will be subject to debate and scrutiny.”
Not really. The local world at large will apparently have to continue to deal with ambiguous Kelsey press releases.
UPDATE: Recession Hits AT&T Online: Kelsey Local Search Advertising Predictions Too? and Yellow Pages Get Reprieve? The Myth of King Google Local Advertising ROI
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