Speaking Sensis

In his first blog for Speaking Sensis, Sensis Group Manager for Yellow Pages® Online & Mobile Product Simon Betschel announces that the latest release of Yellow Pages® Mobile has gone live.

I am excited to announce that the latest release of Yellow Pages® Mobile has gone live, featuring improvements for our advertisers and users.

The release is the culmination of many months work from the mobile development team and it delivers user and advertiser features.

Premium advertisers will be able to include a business logo, image gallery and a new text descriptor. 

Advertisers will also have access to new online and mobile combined summary reports that will demonstrate any improvements to return on investment resulting from extended customer reach.

For users, the new features are mainly targeted to high end devices and focus on improving search accuracy and aligning the online and mobile user experience.

The changes include:

Auto-suggest Type, Name and Location – reducing the number of keystrokes required to enter a search term on a mobile, and time to task for users.  To support this and the search changes, the team developed Hint Text which can also be reused across other mobile sites;

New Maps for iPhone, iPad and Android – now users can pinch to zoom and swipe to pan.  This now takes maps to a world benchmark position for mobile browser based maps;

Seamless Click to Call – enabling calls on high end devices to be actioned immediately and capturing these metrics to report back to our advertisers; and

We will also be releasing new versions of our iPhone and Android apps, and providing iPad support.

This has without a doubt been the largest release of Yellow Pages® Mobile since its inception three years ago and demonstrates just how far internet on the mobile has come in that time.

Sensis was the “book-ends” to the Australian newspaper’s Business section on Monday, with a feature interview with Sensis CEO Bruce Akhurst (read it here) on the front page and a piece with Chief Operating Officer Gerry Sutton (read it here) in the Media section on the back page.

Both pieces touched on the opportunities digital media was providing Sensis and its Yellow Pages® business, with the focus squarely on the iPad as the latest digital device to take the media industry by storm. As discussed by Bruce and Gerry, the exciting prospect for the iPad is the value Sensis can help deliver to end users and ultimately our small and medium sized business customers.

Add to that the impressive strides Sensis has made with its presence in other digital channels such as online, the iPhone, Android devices and Telstra’s T-Hub, and you can see how technology is opening new worlds and chapters for Yellow Pages® and its users and advertisers.

Before I kick off today I’d like to take this opportunity to mention an industry first advertising product for iPhones launched by MediaSmart. Simon Canning at The Australian wrote about it today. You can read his article by clicking here. Sensis’ new interactive mobile ads product was launched to the market this week with Open Universities taking out the first campaign.

Mobility – advertising’s first portable medium

With the buzz surrounding the launch of the iPad in the US - claiming to have sold 300,000 of them in the first day! – now is a good time to touch on an area I feel will provide unprecedented opportunities for advertising agencies, brands and digital publishers in the months and years to come. That area is mobility. And with the launch and uptake of new devices, mobility means the web has become an anytime, anywhere proposition with obvious and exciting opportunities for the ad industry.

To provide you with some background to my thinking, the mobile internet has exploded over the last two years. It is now so large, mobile internet is now considered by many in the industry as mainstream. In December last year, our mobile network hit 2.5m visits for the first time, growing  70% YoY. And by ‘our mobile network’ I am talking about the Yellow Pages, White Pages, Whereis, Citysearch and Sensis Search mobile sites.

And let’s not forget about the continued growth of the BigPond mobile portal – these guys now enjoy more than 2m unique visits each month and the numbers keep growing!

To put this into perspective, after Yellow Pages Online was launched in 1995, it took  five years to reach half a million unique visitors a month. In comparison it’s taken Yellow Pages Mobile only two years to reach that number and White Pages Mobile, which was launched mid last year, has almost achieved that number in only six months.

Now that’s impressive growth by anyone’s standards.

The future of mobility

After Kindle was launched last year, Amazon advised that, on Xmas Day, they sold more e-books than printed books for the first time.

We’re seeing a raft of new touch screens being released onto the market, with the big one – Apple’s iPad – due to hit Aussie stores in the coming weeks and the critics predicting it will revolutionise the way content is accessed.

So we now have devices for almost every occasion and they’re all internet-enabled. From large screen TVs to tiny mobile phones. So what’s next? Accessories!

Will one device eventually control everything? The phone making all other devices its slave? Will all devices operate separately, drawing from the cloud? Or will the future be a hybrid of the two?

That leads me to discuss applications.

The application environment for mobiles is far richer than online in its early years. There are already thousands of apps, books, games etc in Apple’s App Store, we now have Kindle looking for applications. More than half of the White Pages Mobile usage I mentioned above is coming from iPhones.

Precision targeting – it’s now becoming a reality

In 2008, we launched customer profile targeting in mobile which means more efficient advertising for companies and more relevant content for users. With geo-targeting growing rapidly, location services one of the most used mobile apps through both mobile phones and sat nav devices.

Whereis continues to be our most popular mobile application as well as being very popular on the web and sat nav. These sites enable the search for services based on location and the targeting of people based on their location.

So the future of mobility is exciting – and we’re only just warming up.

Mark Shaw