Speaking Sensis

North America’s Yellow Pages Association (YPA) has launched the industry’s first Sustainability Report to focus on environmental commitments, impacts and goals of major US industry players.

Designed to document sustainability efforts on an annual basis, the report provides a benchmark for the organisation’s goals for 2010 and beyond.

Key successes outlined in the report include:

• Launch of industry consumer choice programs (www.yellowpagesoptout.com) to give consumers in the United States a choice to reduce or stop directory delivery;

• Use by some companies of directory paper that contains recycled content and fibre derived from “residual chips,” (by-product after logs are converted to lumber) making it unnecessary to use new trees to produce Yellow Pages;

• A 29 per cent reduction in the use of directory paper since 2006, as a result of programs to reduce the size of directories, use of more efficient pagination systems and expansion to digital and mobile search products like Internet Yellow Pages sites and apps;

• Implementation by some North American companies of soy-based inks and non-toxic dyes that pose little threat to soil or groundwater supplies and adhesives in the binding process that are eco-friendly and non-toxic; and

• Support of recycling and up-cycling programs that ensure directories have a life after use, either as new paper or for other materials like coffee cup trays, egg cartons, cellulose insulation and cereal boxes.

“We’ve made so much quiet progress since we set environmental guidelines for the industry in 2007 in the areas of resource reduction, manufacturing, and recycling. There’s no better time than now to report to communities and consumers about the actionable steps we’ve taken and to outline where our industry needs to go,” Neg Norton, president, YPA said.

This report is an excellent first step for the industry in becoming more transparent and detailing publically its commitments to product stewardship and sustainable business practises.

It demonstrates the focus of sustainability on our international counterparts and is a response to consumer demands to be more sustainable. 

While Sensis is significantly further ahead in reporting terms, we can learn from some of the excellent product stewardship examples. The most important lesson we can learn is: it is much more profitable to voluntarily lead in sustainable business practises than to simply deliver compliance.

On Thursday 22 April, I went along to Victoria’s most prestigious environmental awards ceremony: the 2010 Premier’s Sustainability Awards, which saw printing business VEGA Press win both the Small Business and Premier’s Recognition Awards. 

Victorian Premier John Brumby and Sensis General Manager Corporate Affairs Prue Deniz congratulate Vega Press Commercial Manager Robert Nugent. Photo: James Thomas

For the second year running, Sensis sponsored the ‘Small Business’ award category, which was also won by VEGA Press.

And as a nice little behind the scenes story, Sensis contracted VEGA Press to print some promotional material for our soon-to-be launched ‘Small Business, Big Opportunity: Sustainable Growth’ book the day before the Premier’s Sustainability Awards.

We appointed environmentalist Jon Dee to write the new book for small businesses, which features practical information and tips on how to improve their bottom line while also reducing their impact on the environment.

The book also looks at how small businesses can gain a competitive advantage by embracing environmentally sustainable practices, which is exactly what happened with Sensis and VEGA Press.

We put a call out to our print brokers for a printer with sensational environmental credentials that would allow us to print this piece of collateral in a way that had a minimum impact on the environment. VEGA Press came in with the most price competitive quote and the best environmentally sustainable credentials – which won them the job.

It’s wonderful to see first hand a practical example of a small business using its commitment to environmental sustainability to win work from a large business.

Vega Press is Australia’s first business to gain international certification for greenhouse gas verification from SGS Australia. It purchases carbon offsets to ensure all of its operational greenhouse gas emissions are calculated and offset. It has installed systems to reduce water consumption by 50 per cent, energy usage by 20 per cent, and since 2006 – waste sent to landfill has reduced by more than 50 per cent.

The theme for this year’s Premier’s Sustainability Awards was ‘Rise to the challenge of change’, recognising organisations that are acting now for sustainability.

It was held at the Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre, which is fitting since the MECC was the first convention centre in the country to be awarded a ‘6 Star Green Star’ environmental rating by the Green Building Council of Australia.

I wanted to share the story of VEGA Press winning Sensis’ business because of its commitment to sustainability, in hope of motivating other small businesses to take some steps towards greening up their operations as well.

Congratulations to everyone involved – entrants, finalists, and of course the winners. May your commitment to sustainability inspire and motivate others to embrace sustainability and ‘rise to the challenge of change’.

If you are in small business, it will not be surprising news that the latest Sensis® Business Index found that, on balance, Australia’s SMEs are more likely to report that it is comparatively more difficult to access finance for their businesses at the moment.

Some 35 per cent of SMEs felt that it was comparatively difficult to access finance at the moment.  This compared to only 20 per cent that felt it was comparatively easy.

In particular, this will not be surprising if you were in the 20 per cent of SMEs that told us that they had tried to access finance in the past quarter.

And it will really not be surprising if you were included in the 19 per cent of those that had applied for finance and not been successful.

Being able to access finance is an issue which is critical to small businesses.  Finance can be the essential ingredient for fuelling small business growth, as well as ensuring that new business opportunities can enter the market.

There are, of course, two sides of the market for finance, there is the demand for finance and the supply of finance. Both sides of the market have been impacted by the recent economic downturn.

So it is important that there is data available which tries to track both the demand and supply for finance for small businesses in a robust and objective manner.

In the latest Sensis® Business Index we started collecting data to highlight the factors impacting how small businesses access finance.  These insights cover how many businesses have tried to access finance, the proportion that were successful and how accommodative they felt that financial institutions currently were in providing finance.

As part of our commitment to the small businesses that are the backbone of the Australian economy, Sensis provided this data in a submission to the Senate’s Inquiry into the Access of Small Business to Finance, which will hopefully assist the Inquiry in making sound policy decisions in this area.  You can access our submission on the Inquiry’s website by clicking here.

If you have a story to tell about accessing finance or have any feedback about our submission, feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of the story.

Networks, platforms and technology were the focus of comments from Sensis CEO Bruce Akhurst at a recent panel discussion held as part of the recent 2010 Yellow Pages Association Conference in Las Vegas.

‘Transformers’ was the theme for the conference, which was attended by Sensis CEO, Bruce Akhurst and COO Gerry Sutton. Autobots and Decepticons weren’t central to discussions, however, which instead focussed on industry changes, including technology and social media.

Bruce sat on a four CEO-strong panel around the topic ‘Being Built to Last’. The panel was moderated by BIA/Kelsey’s Charles Laughlin and featured Kimberli Lewis of Mediatel, Scott Pomeroy of Berry and Matt Stover of Local Matters, as well as Bruce.

The panel spoke about the importance of the right networks moving forward.

Bruce also spoke of his belief in continual training of the traditional sales force and their adaptability, and changing a fear of failure to achieve a sustainable future.

Bruce also responded to a question around the transformation of core product to a multi-product environment:

“Our central function is to find buyers for our customers – where are they? And they’re looking in all sorts of different places. Usage for our print product continues pretty much to be what it’s been for the last five or six years, so we’re not believers in ‘the end of print’. We are believers in other platforms and other technologies being relevant to find buyers – so it’s putting all that together in a way that works best for the customer.”

You can watch part of the panel discussion (where dress code seems to have been ‘black’) on this video link.

The last six months of 2009 was a mixed bag for the Australian media market. While a number of media are experiencing real challenges, the sector as a whole showed slight improvement in the December half, with the Internet and TV (particularly pay TV) being the big winners.

So, do you like a good roller coaster? Well, the ad industry has a pearler for you.

According to the December 2009 CEASA Report – the ‘bible’ of revenue in the Australian main media market – the GFC gave the ad industry a not unexpected whacking in 2009. Advertising expenditure (covering newspapers, magazines, directories, TV, radio, online, outdoor and cinema) fell by 8% during 2009 to about $12.6bn.

Ouch.

Mind you, just like all good roller coasters, just when the slippery slope looks like slamming you into the soil, up you go again. The CEASA report pointed to a slight improvement in the December half. And while things still looked weak, they weren’t quite as bad (in most places) as the June half, suggesting a recovery maybe in play.

To reinforce this trend, the latest SMI report, which came out a few days ago, suggested that the media market gathered the upward force of your average space shuttle in the March quarter, with growth of approximately 10% compared to the same time last year. Mind you, the SMI report doesn’t cover the full market in the way CEASA does, so you can’t directly compare the results.

While this is good news for a media sector that did it tough during 2009, the champagne corks aren’t popping everywhere. In fact, when you look under the hood, you find that the results across different sectors of the ad industry are going up and down like a … well, this is a family blog.

So who were the big winners and losers in 2009?

The Ups

Not surprisingly, online was the only major sector to grow in 2009, although it clearly wasn’t a great year by Internet standards. In fact, the industry looked quite weak in the July and September quarters before staging a strong recovery in December.

And, although it still declined by 6% for the year, TV – that other big screen – was also a winner. That’s because TV did a lot better in December (down 2.9%) than June (down 10.6%). This result was heavily supported by pay TV, which grew by 5% for the year.

In fact, TV revenue did so well compared to other the rest of the market that it actually out-muscled newspapers in 2009 to become Australia’s highest earning media sector, possibly for the first time in history.

The Downs

Of course, what goes up must come down … and there’s a few different media that lost big in 2009.

Newspapers were down almost 16% in 2009, although, like TV, they showed a reasonable overall improvement in the December half. But suburban newspapers defied that trend: the 21% decline they experienced in the December half was actually worse than June.

The other big loser was the magazine sector, which went from a 9% decline in the June half to a 26% decline in December.

But the really big loser has got to be classifieds. All newspaper and magazine revenues tend to be a mix of display advertising and classifieds. And while the display ads didn’t do too badly (national newspaper ads were down 5.6% for the year), classifieds took a bath, with newspaper classifieds down 32% and magazine classifieds down a blood curdling 45% (although they are a small part of the overall magazine revenue base).

Directories down? Well, yes… but not all is as it seems

The other segment that was down in the December half was classified directories, which includes print directories and used to also include The Trading Post print. Although there’s some pretty clear reasons why.

Firstly, the Trading Post print publication was closed during the year. This of course heavily impacts the result.

Secondly, Yellow Pages® and White Pages® print revenues are recognised in our accounts mainly in the half of the year following the sale. So the decline you’re seeing in print directories was actually the decline in sales experienced in the June half, when everyone else also fell.

So that’s it:
•    A media industry that’s coming out of the GFC with what looks like a sudden growth spurt in the first three months of this year;
•    And results across the industry that are so topsy turvy they’ll have your cheeks flopping about like a parachutists’ in no time.

Which leaves me with one final question.

Can someone please pass me that brown paper bag?

It’s easy to get carried away with the excitement surrounding “latest trends”, “new ideas” and “cutting edge” technology. We did it in the dot com boom when all we cared about was what the internet looked like and what it did. The thought of how the internet could make every day tasks easy caused our dial-up modems to run hot with excitement.

What we didn’t do was put a lot of thought into how to monetise it outside existing commercial models and we all know what happened after that.

But after attending the recent ad:tech 2010 conference at Sydney Convention Centre, I believe we are once again on the crest of an exciting new wave of technology and subsequently advertising opportunity.

At ad:tech 2010, it was discussed how connection speeds and mobility were bringing forward new ideas about how to reach and advertise online. And with Australian’s now spending up to one third of our leisure time online, consumers are waiting to be reached.

While online leisure time once meant time spent sitting in front of the computer, it now includes time spent sitting with your smartphone.

Collectively, Facebook users are spending seven hours a month on Facebook, 77 per cent of us read blogs and YouTube has more than 100 million unique visitors a month across the world and growing. In Australia in the past year we have seen Twitter account growth of 1050 per cent. The stats on Twitter usage are mind blowing with Twitter recently reporting that it was seeing 50 million tweets per day — that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.

Driving this growth in usage is mobile access. I know you’re all thinking “here’s another mobile blog post”. But with the launch rate and uptake of new mobile devices, the web is an anytime, anywhere proposition that’s no longer about sitting in the corner on your PC.

Did you know that 4.7 million mobile users around the world accessed Twitter from their mobile browser in January? This represents 347 per cent growth from the 1.05 million mobile users in January 2009. And in January 2010, 25.1 million mobile users accessed Facebook via their mobile browser worldwide, up 112 per cent from 11.8 million mobile users in January 2009. Incredible!

As consumers, if we are spending all this time online, then that’s where we are going to be when businesses want to talk to us. And that folks, was the underlying focus of ad:tech 2010.

The key themes of the two day conference were how business can tap into the explosion in activity that is social media and how mobile usage has contributed to us spending even more of our time online. I know that there are social media deniers out there and they must be in the minority because any stream focused on social media was packed to the rafters. The main areas of social media focus were how business was using aspects of social media usage to drive its advertising reach.

Here is a quick take-away for those of you who didn’t make it to the social media streams at ad:tech 2010:

• Do “listen in” and “contribute” to the conversations occurring on various platforms. The key message was that as a business, you should be monitoring, reacting and responding.

• Don’t see social media as a short term strategy or fad. The clear message at ad:tech was that it needs to become an ongoing form of engagement. Marketers have had mixed fortunes when it comes to tapping into social media, they frequently try to engage with brand ambassadors and embrace user generated content. There were numerous examples of businesses that were able to gather a following through clever campaigns and events, but only to let them go as soon as the campaign was over.

• Remind yourself that you don’t have complete control. You can guide the followers, but once you overstep the mark and try to take control, you risk damaging your brand.

Without doubt advertising ideas and thinking relating to social media are in their infancy.

There have been numerous social media campaigns from mainstream advertisers who measure this success through video views, followers and friends.

The challenge moving forward is to turn these friends and followers into hard currency.

It is a task not dissimilar to a retailer attracting people into their store and then getting them to make a purchase.

The anomaly of Sydney Convention Centre as the venue for ad:tech 2010 was not lost on me. It was here in the early days of online that I attended many exhibitions promoting the internet. I’m pretty sure one of Sensis’ (then Pacific Access) key messages at those early PC shows was that it’s not all about “hits”, it’s about buyers. From that perspective nothing has changed.

Recently, there’s been a lot of strong talk about the future opportunities created by mobile technology.

The highly respected Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley recently said: “We believe more users may connect via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years.” Eric Schmidt of Google was prompted to say: “If you want to understand the future of the internet, don’t think of it as pipes and tubes. Think of it broader as a mobile device.”

And Google Europe’s boss John Herlihy went a step further by saying: “In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant … In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs.” While not everyone ascribes to Herlihy’s point of view, it does really underline the ‘mobile mania’ running through the industry at the moment.

So is this excitement justified? Simple answer - you bet!

First up, mobile Internet uptake has been extraordinary. The Sensis® eBusiness Report last year found that finding local products and businesses was the most popular use for mobiles with 41% searching for information on products and services and 36% searching for information on suppliers of products and services. By contrast, use for social networking is 40%.

And numbers are tipped to continue to grow and this will be borne out in the next Sensis® eBusiness Report, which will be out later this year. Usage of our mobile sites is also growing at a cracking pace. In 2009, usage of our mobile sites grew by 70% YoY.

 Mobiles – everyone has got one

Secondly, the headroom for growth is huge.

Globally there are currently about 3.2 billion mobile subscribers in the world and that number is expected to grow by at least a billion in the next few years. Today, mobile phones are more prevalent than cars (there’s about 800 million registered vehicles in the world) and credit cards (there’s only 1.4 billion of those). So significant has been there take up that fewer teens are now wearing watches because they use their phones to tell time. It could be safe to say that the mobile phone may be the most prolific consumer product to be invented.

Even in Australia there are more mobile services in operation than there are people!

Mobiles are evolving – rapidly

And thirdly, the mobile phones we have today are incredibly powerful, and getting moreso every month.

The first mobile internet connected device was launched in 1997.  The Synergy, launched by Philips, was the first smart phone on the market and while sales were poor, it paved the way for the smart phones of today.

And in 2000 Panasonic took things a step further with a converged gaming device and phone – a forerunner to the iPhone.  Again sales were poor and the phone was impossible to fit in your pocket, let alone the gaming console!  But these innovations helped shape where we are today.

The phones we use today are a totally different beast. In fact, behind all the cool applications is an engine that is probably ten times more powerful than the PC you had on your desk only 5 to 10 years ago.

And the whole mobile experience is just going to get better and better with new devices, new operating systems, like the Android and Apple’s OS4, and a never-ending stream of mobile apps.

The future …

But this is just the start. In fact, when you start to think about what’s coming in the coming five to ten years, the whole conversation starts to take on a distinctly Star Wars tone.

• Mobile internet will extend to new devices. Already we have seen the launch of iPad, NetBook, and Kindle – the next round of mobile connected devices will include in car Navigation systems;

• Solar powered phones – While there are already a few solar powered phones available today, we should expect to see them evolve quickly over the next 2 years with their primary goal to service third world countries and people who do not have access to electricity;

• Sixth Sense Technology – For me this is the most exciting mobile opportunity.  Imagine being able to project the content on your mobile phone onto a wall (or any surface for that matter) and use your hands to type emails, sort and share photos, read the newspaper and get shown the latest video content displayed onto the actual newspaper (yes the paper version)?  Oh and don’t forget that you’ll also be able to make phone calls, but they may change a little as well. Click here to look Sixth Sense Technology in action;

• Holographic screens – Do you remember in Star Wars when R2D2 mistakenly plays a holographic of Princess Leia saying: “Help me, Obi Wan. You’re my only hope”? Well we could expect that on our mobile devices in the next five to 10 years;

• Augmented reality – AR is live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment where elements are augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery;

• Near Field Communications – the ability to scan your mobile at the point of sale to pay for goods; and

• Wearable technologies – like a mobile phone in your glasses. In fact, Apple just hired wearable technology expert, Richard DeVaul, as “Senior Prototype Engineer”.

So there’s definitely a lot of reason for the excitement about mobiles and its being driven by usage that’s now mainstream and technology that’s advancing at a rate of knots.

At the end of the day, the mobile phone will prove itself to be more than just another channel. It will be a game-change for the way businesses and consumers all over the world communicate.