Infoserve Group

The award-winning Hovis commercial about the boy going for a loaf of bread and journeying through the decades until he arrives back in the 21^st century began a nostalgic trend.

The cleverly reworked Milky Bar Kid and Persil Mum showing the commercials through the ages quickly followed.

Having discovered that nostalgia reinforces strong brands and sells products it won’t be long before others follow suit.

But this approach will not work for everyone, especially those companies overtaken by technology.

Take Yellow Pages for example. As brilliant and memorable as the commercials were, we are unlikely to hear the ‘Good Old Yellow Pages’ strapline being repeated.

Although it is accurate, as online marketing has all but consigned paper directories to the bin, Yellow Pages will not want to bring attention to the ‘old’ method of business search.

Re-running the cult JR Hartley commercial would only serve to demonstrate the time consuming method we once used. Today, Mr Hartley would not have to ring countless bookshops to ask if they had his book. A quick search on the internet and he would have found it in a couple of clicks.

Business marketing in paper directories was fairly straightforward in those days. Pay a lot of money for a large advertisement and the perception is that you are a successful and trustworthy company. The bigger the advertisement the more likely you were to be chosen.

The consumer of today is much savvier. They can do a lot more research about a company via online local search now. Not only can they find the product or service they need quickly but by clicking on enhanced listings in an online business directory or a well optimised website they can take a look at the company’s website and find out much more about them.

Mind you with Government statistics suggesting that nearly 50% of SMEs do not have a website, even though an effective one can be produced for less than £100, it demonstrates a lot of companies are still missing out on potential customers.

Perhaps some are still clinging on to listings in paper directories. But even Yellow Pages must have realised the writing was on the wall when they brought out the TV commercial of the small boy standing on one of their directories to kiss a girl. The pay off line explained that there were so many other uses for Yellow Pages than looking for a plumber to repair a leaky tap.

Having said that, one part of their marketing campaign still holds true today.

You can still ‘Let your fingers do the walking!’… Except now they are more likely to be using a keyboard rather than thumbing through a paper directory!

It’s very interesting watching the recent television programmes reminding us how far gadgetry and IT progressed over the last decade. We can look back with fondness and a bit of a smile at brick-like mobile phones, walkmans, and video recorders?

But one of the greatest advancements has to be the Internet.

When we started Infoserve in the last century (1999 to be precise) the Internet was in its relative infancy. Do you remember having to dial up to get online in those days?

So we can forgive those people who thought we were a little crazy all those years ago when we told them about our prediction that paper directories would gradually be phased out and replaced by people searching for their products and services on the internet.

It was a tough sell. Yellow Pages dominated the market and through brilliant marketing they created a fear factor among SMEs. Businesses were literally scared of not being in the directory in their area.

It’s been a long journey for Infoserve since then. Being the first in the UK to have this vision (we believe), we feel as though we have set the pace and created the agenda for online local search.

Imagine when we set up city-visitor.co.uk. There was nothing like it around, so we had to build it from scratch. Today it is one of the most used business finders on the net with 12 million number one positions and 22 million first page positions on the major search engines!

In the last ten years or so we have invested an enormous amount of money in the business. We have continued to build our technical platform and improve search performance to cater for the huge growth in online marketing by SMEs.

And its growth has been astounding.

Today 38.5 million people (63.8% of the population) use the internet in the UK¹. This has resulted in 86% of all local searches taking place online² with 90% of these searches resulting in offline activity³ and 61% of the offline activity resulting in a purchase⁴.

Some people may say it was a huge leap of faith when we set up in 1999 but we like to think it was extraordinary vision.

So if you are looking for dramatic changes in the next ten years, the way companies advertise themselves has got to be right up there.

It is incredible to think that the Internet has now overtaken TV advertising.

With 90% of consumer purchases made within 20 miles of where people live or work⁵, SMEs are now worried about not being found when people are looking online for and the products and services they provide.

1. Source: Nielsen Ner//Ratings;
2, 3, 5. Source: The Kelsey Group, March 2008;
4. Source: TMP Directional Marketing Source