Speaking Sensis

With the end of the year almost upon us, Sensis’ CEO, Bruce Akhurst, provides his first bi-monthly update.

Hi.

I thought it might be good to end the year by starting something… a regular report that I hope will give you a deeper insight into how Sensis is working to improve the value we offer all Australians.

New ways to help you find, buy and sell
Sensis is committed to helping you find, buy and sell. Our services help you find the suppliers you need right when you need them. In doing this, we help thousands of local businesses find their lifeblood – customers.

Our innovation programs reflect this commitment. How can we make our services simpler and more informative for buyers? And how can we build the value and simplicity of our advertiser services?

On this front, we’ve been particularly busy in the last few weeks. We launched the White Pages® app for iPhone recently. I was very happy to see that it reached the #1 free app in Apple’s App Store very quickly. This caps off an exciting quarter for our mobile sites, with usage growing off the scale. We launched White Pages® Mobile four months ago and it’s already delivering over 400,000 visits a month¹. At about the same time, we also launched the Yellow Pages® iPhone app. Since then, Yellow Pages® Mobile usage has more than doubled to over 650,000 visits a month²… in just a few months!  Clearly, Australians are connecting with these new generation mobile services and that’s great for advertisers. Our network strategy means that Yellow Pages® advertisers – print and online – can be searched through mobile and therefore can benefit from mobile usage growth.

We’ve also recently commenced delivery of the 2009 Yellow Pages®. This year’s book includes a more informative front cover and an expanded information section. Both of these enhancements were specific requests from Australians who participated in research we conducted earlier this year.

In Yellow Pages® Online, we’ve recently launched a new advertiser product – Purely Mobile Business, or PMB. PMB is designed for mobile businesses, like mobile mechanics, looking to reach out to customers in the areas they service.

We also recently launched Category Search, which is a new product that lets advertisers combine Voice, Whereis® and Citysearch® advertising into a single, easy to use product. Response has been strong, with hundreds of customers choosing Category Search in just a few weeks.

The Whereis® team has just released 3D City Maps for GPS to sat nav equipment manufacturers. 3D City Maps bring the Sydney and Melbourne CBD areas to life by providing a real-time 3D city-scape. 3D City Maps should be launched in popular GPS units shortly, and more cities will be ‘3D’d’ in the near future.

Finally, MediaSmart – our online and mobile display advertising business – has released new targeting capabilities. Working closely with Telstra, we’ve developed a segmentation capability that ensures mobile display advertising is more relevant and targeted for both mobile users and advertisers… like helping a major bank deliver specific branch manager contact details to customers mobile phones based on their location. This is a genuinely unique capability and I’m pleased to say the support from marketers has been fantastic.

In the field
Right now, our Yellow Pages® regional and local consultants are out talking to advertisers, as are our White Pages® consultants. We’ve been backing them up with new products, comprehensive training and a much stronger focus on engaging with local communities.

This local focus led to the opening of a new office in Penrith on November 10 (with offices in Ballina and Coffs Harbour also opening soon). We were really pleased to open Penrith by announcing a new community partnership with Great Community Transport. At the same time, we’ve been increasing our support for local businesses by regularly sponsoring and speaking at local events – over 80 in the last few months.

1.5 million calls… and counting
If you ever wanted proof of the value of Yellow Pages®, here it is. As you may know, we’ve been running a metered ad program for two years now. This program helps advertisers track the number of calls they receive from Yellow Pages® print.

In January, we began monitoring the phone calls delivered by Yellow Pages® print to a small cross-section of display ad customers (a sample of less than 1% of our total customer base). By early November, the number of calls delivered to these customers by Yellow Pages® print passed the 1.5 million threshold!

Imagine how many valuable phone calls Yellow Pages® is delivering to all our advertisers. Imagine how many more enquiries there are when you add people who are bypassing the phone and visiting the store or office. And imagine how that number could grow even further if you included all the other Sensis and third party online, mobile and voice services that form the Yellow Pages® network.

Interesting movements in the advertising market
Recently, we’ve seen some interesting movements in the media sector. The September quarter IAB report showed 3.3% growth in the online advertising market compared to the September quarter last year³. While this is a marked slowdown on last year, the results were really buoying for Sensis, as they show we are growing our share of the market.

Another interesting observation comes from our Adstream business. Adstream sits at the centre of the ad industry by helping marketers, agencies and media outlets, like TV, radio and newspaper publishers, manage and distribute their ad content. We’ve seen renewed growth in enquiries to Adstream recently. Could this mean the ad industry’s on its way back?

Our people have spoken
The other day, we received the results of our latest employee opinion survey. This is a global survey undertaken by Towers Perrin and it covers some of Australia’s, and the worlds, largest companies. In the latest survey, Sensis exceeded the Australian norm (the average of all Australian companies) in every category. Our results also benchmarked well among the world’s best employers, with results in a number of categories exceeding global norms. This is fantastic news. We work hard to ensure Sensis is a great place to work for our present and future employees. These results tell us we’re on the right track.

Sensis Sustainability Report
Finally, if you’d like to know more about Sensis’ strategy, operations, performance and impacts, I’d recommend you check out the 2008/9 Sensis Sustainability Report, which has just been launched. You can download it today from our newly upgraded corporate site.

Until next time
So that’s it for now. Have a happy, relaxing and safe Christmas and New Year. I’ll be back to you with a further update in February. In the meantime, thanks for all your support. You can rest assured we’ll be pulling out all stops to keep improving our value to you.

1: Omiture Site Catalyst, November 2009;
2: ibid
3: PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Internet Advertising Bureau Online Advertising Expenditure Report, quarter ended September 2009.

A high-tech, high-powered mapping vehicle will be putting areas surrounding Cunnamulla and St George on the map this week…quite literally.

Little-known Queensland towns in this area will be some of the many new inclusions that Whereis® – Australia’s local mapping expert – will soon be adding to its extensive navigation map database of Australian cities, towns, landmarks and roads.

“The Whereis® four-wheel-drive has a large, round Trimble GPS receiver on the roof. It’s been causing a bit of a stir as it passes through towns in Queensland as people try to work out what’s going on,” Adrian Tout of Whereis® said.

“People get quite excited when they find out we’re mapping most of Queensland’s roads and landmarks so that locals, as well as visitors, have access to the most up-to-date map information on Queensland in their GPS device,” he said.

“While Queensland is one of Australia’s most popular tourist destinations you wouldn’t know how to get to a lot of areas unless you had local knowledge. With Whereis maps in your GPS device, it’s like taking someone who knows the lay-of-the-land with you – with useful details such as the condition of the road.”

“Our team on the road is making a big effort to mark points of interest for travelers – boat ramps, highway rest areas, spectacular look-outs, motels and van parks, public river access points are all detailed for travelers keen to go off the beaten track.”

The Whereis® car has logged more than 245,000 kilometres of mainland Australian roads to date this year, and is on-schedule to log a further 6,500 kilometres in Queensland during the next few months. The Whereis team will then convert the data into digital maps to be used in GPS units, the online mapping site whereis.com, various navigation apps for the iPhone and the Whereis® Navigator application, which is accessible on selected Telstra mobile phones.

Andrew Wood, part of the Whereis mapping team has been assigned to this important mission. He has mapped thousands of kilometers of road for Whereis and has teamed up with a skilled driver to map Queensland. “This is the best job in the world – I get paid to drive around one of Australia’s most beautiful states,” he said.

“Some of the maps people are using to navigate Queensland today are extremely old and many have simply been digitised from older printed maps – and large parts of back roads on maps are also inaccurate. We also taking into account the many changes that have been made over the years with the development of intersection upgrades on main roads and new estates,” Andrew said.

The two-man Whereis team has already mapped more than 30,000km in south-eastern Queensland including Wallangarra, Gatton, Esk, Kingaroy, Chinchilla and Gooniwindi.

Andrew counts seeing two kangaroos going head to head in the middle of the road as one of the most unusual things he’s seen during his travels to date and is looking forward to visiting the Gulf and Cape York to try his hand at Barramundi fishing.

The Whereis car began its Queensland adventure in Stanthorpe, mapping an old road that had been re-opened. Over the next few weeks, the car will be focusing on the areas surrounding Cunnamulla and St George with travelers and locals in mind.

Yesterday, Sensis launched a new website, White Pages® Community, an extension of White Pages® Online.  White Pages® Community has been created to share three key types of information with the Australian community:

Key contact information for the public in emergency situations;
Information about our Directory Covers Program, and;
White Pages® News.

Bri Williams, White Pages® Usage Manager, spoke about the initial driver behind the development of the site being the important role of White Pages® in connecting Australians in times of crisis.

“We know that when a crisis happens, like bushfires or flood, it is vital that people can get in contact with the organisations they need.  In these times in particular White Pages® wants to be able to help. It’s a role we’ve played for more than 129 years, and we are really proud to be taking it a step further.

“In times of large scale public emergency we will have a highly visible link from White Pages® Online to White Pages® Community. From here, people will be able to find important contact information for emergency service authorities so they can find the right details quickly and easily.  The site will not focus on emergency status updates – that’s the role of the emergency management authorities.

“We are also really excited that the Directory Covers program will now have a fitting online home.  This is a hugely successful community based program which pays tribute to extraordinary Australians by giving them pride of place on our regional and metro White Pages® directories,” Bri said.

Nationally across 56 regions this year the campaign, which profiled Creative Australians, reached an audience of millions of people.  White Pages® Community will grow this audience even further by featuring the stunning cover photography (including covers from the past 3 years) and telling the stories of our cover heroes. It will also provide information to the public on how they can nominate a Covers hero.

White Pages® News is the third section of White Pages® Community.  Here people can read about how they can get more out of White Pages® products including the print directory, online and mobile sites.  For example, you can read about ht e newly launched White Pages® iPhone app as well as about the White Pages® Community site itself.

If you know of an organisation who may wish to be considered for inclusion on White Pages® Community in the event of a public emergency, please drop us a line via the comments box.

The latest Sensis® Business Index recorded the third successive quarter of growth in confidence amongst Australia’s small and medium businesses.  Report author Christena Singh takes us through the key results and some of the challenges facing SMEs and the economy going forward.

It was really encouraging to see the Sensis® Business Index record the third successive quarter of growth in confidence amongst Australian small businesses.  SME confidence has now risen by some 40 percentage points in the past three quarters, to a net balance of 52 per cent.

And while the continued increase in confidence and performance is good news, it is important to realise that we are still only partly down the path of economic recovery.  If you look at the indicators compared to their long term averages, you can see that while confidence is now four percentage points above its long term average, all performance indicators are still tracking below their long term average levels.

For example, as you can see in the attached chart, the sales performance indicator is some four percentage points lower, profitability five percentage points lower and capital expenditure nine percentage points lower.  The indicator that is closest to its long term average is employment, which is only one percentage point lower.

And all of these indicators with the exception of capital expenditure have risen in the past quarter.  So Australian SMEs have made good progress on the path to economic recovery but there is still some way to go.

And this is perhaps emphasised by the fact that SMEs are expecting conditions to moderate over the next quarter to some extent, with more thinking that the Australian economy will be weaker in a year’s time.  While many SMEs are still facing challenges such as reduced demand and cash flow, others are already facing the “problems” of economic growth, including difficulties finding staff.

Six months ago the Australian economy had to face the challenges of economic downturn.  We have seen the Australian economy and Australia’s small and medium business meet this challenge.  But in many ways the challenges of economic recovery will be more complex, with the need to tackle both the problems of growth and decline at the same time.  This will be the challenge the Australian economy will face for the year ahead.