Speaking Sensis

At an American Chamber of Commerce luncheon next week, Sensis CEO, Bruce Akhurst, will be talking about the challenges and opportunities Sensis has faced in evolving the Yellow Pages® from a print directory to a multi-channel, multi-brand network.

Thanks to digital media, we now live in a world of proliferating choice.

And, with their attention, people are telling us they want that choice. They’re demanding ubiquitous access to media – what they want, whenever and wherever they want it.

In this world, the challenge for media companies isn’t “how do I get advertisers online?” It’s “how do I get them everywhere”?

On Tuesday 1 June, Sensis CEO Bruce Akhurst will be in Sydney talking at an American Chamber of Commerce luncheon about “The Challenge of Choice”.

Bruce will discuss Yellow Pages®’ decade-long journey from a print directory to a multi-channel, multi-brand advertising network:  a journey that has challenged Sensis’ technology, product development and every other part of the business.

If you’d like to attend, you can find more information about the event, together with booking details, at the American Chamber of Commerce web site.

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.

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.

I read in the paper this morning that when Elizabeth Blackburn was a young woman, she was asked by a family friend: “What’s a nice girl like you doing studying science?” On Monday, Dr Blackburn became the first Australian woman to win a Nobel Prize.

It made me realise how lucky I am as a businesswoman in 2009, that I don’t have to put up with that kind of rubbish. It also made me proud to be working for a company with 40 per cent of its senior management positions held by females.

Fresh off my Australian-business-woman-pride with role models like Dr Blackburn leading the way for young business women all over the country, I gladly accepted an invitation to attend the 2009 Victorian Telstra Business Women’s Awards at Crown Palladium in Melbourne on Tuesday 6 October.

The winner of the White Pages® Community and Government Award category was Professor Pauline Nugent, Dean of Health Sciences at Australian Catholic University and Chair of Southern Health.

Professor Nugent was overseas for work at the time of the awards announcement and had sent her sister along sans speech because she was so sure she wasn’t going to win. Not only did Professor Nugent win the White Pages® Community and Government Award category, she was also announced as the 2009 Victorian Telstra Business Women of the year!

The Honourable Maxine Morand, Minister for Women’s Affairs congratulated Professor Nugent and spoke about the wonderful progress women have made in the business arena in Australia, but she also reminded the room of 500 that there is still a way to go with regard to equality in the workplace.

“Legislation may be needed to set quotas for board appointments in the private sector given that only eight per cent of board members on the top 200 are women,” Minister Morand said.

It was a good reminder for me, that while I’m lucky enough to work for a company which has many inspiring business women holding senior roles, it’s not the same across the board, so to speak.

Minister Morand has also recently mentioned that in the 2008/09 financial year, it takes women an extra 62 days to earn what men earn over the same period, based on average full-time earnings.

So, while we have made progress in Australia – there’s still a long way to go. We need to start challenging the way we think about women in business and continue the great (albeit slow) progress we’ve made to achieve equality among men and women in the workplace.

Whereis® is now offering Australians three new ways to find their way around town – Whereis® fuel savings, Whereis® Navigator turn by turn instructions from the 1234 voice service and Whereis® Traffic.

Whereis® fuel savings
When it goes live on 17 August, Whereis® Fuel will take the guesswork out of finding cheap fuel.

The simple, new mobile application uses GPS data to help find the cheapest fuel nearby from Australia’s best source of fuel price information, MotorMouth.com.au. The fuel service adds to the existing suite of rich content already available through Whereis® Navigator which includes weather forecasts, traffic incident alerts and business searches via Yellow Pages®.

Mario Davoli, General Manager, Telstra Mobile Applications, said the Whereis® Navigator functionality means users can then opt to receive turn-by-turn, spoken directions from any location to help find the nearest and cheapest fuel supplier listed.

Sign up for a free, 7-day trial of Whereis® Navigator on compatible handsets* to take advantage of the full suite of GPS functions.

Easy as 1234
Dial 1234 on a Whereis® Navigator enabled handset and you can now receive turn-by turn spoken directions to Yellow™ and White Pages® listings anywhere across Australia.

Whereis® Navigator customers can now enjoy all the benefits of an in-car GPS via the new integrated mobile service.

Whereis® Navigator, Commercial Manager, Fred Curtis regards 1234 integration as a significant step towards seamless mobile navigation technology.

“The fact that it now only takes a quick phone call and single click on an SMS link for a Whereis® Navigator customer to be guided via spoken directions to one of thousands of locations across the country is a really exciting development,” he said

An added ‘send to a friend’ function allows for simple sharing of direction data via SMS.

Whereis® Traffic
Avoiding serious traffic jams and finding your way around major traffic incidents just got easier, with launch of Whereis® Navigator Traffic in Adelaide, Canberra and Perth.

The new feature launched initially in March in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane helps drivers choose the best route to their destination by re-directing them around high-impact traffic incidents.

Whereis® Navigator is available on a range of mobile handsets including a selection of Blackberry, iMate, Palm Treo, Samsung, HTC, Nokia and Sony Ericsson devices. For further information, customers can visit their local Telstra shop or dealer, www.telstra.com/navigator or call 13 22 00.

Sensis’ Michelle Sherwood talks to small and medium sized businesses about how to get the most bang for their advertising buck.

Sensis’ General Manager of Marketing, Michelle Sherwood presented to a room of more than 900 small and medium sized businesses at the Small Business BIG Marketing event on Thursday 27 August.

Held at Central Pier in the Docklands, the event was a part of Small Business Victoria’s month long small business festival Energise Enterprise 09, of which Yellow Pages® is a platinum sponsor.

Michelle’s presentation, ‘Making your advertising work for you’ gave the businesses in the room practical insights and advice about effectively marketing and advertising.

Michelle Sherwood on the dais

“With consumer confidence on the increase, it’s more important than ever for your business to be seen by customers when they’re looking to buy.

“Our job at Yellow Pages® is to bring buyers and sellers together, whether that be through print, online or mobile directories, search and mapping websites or telephone information services,” she said.

The Yellow Pages® and White Pages® face to face sales representatives were also out in force, with small business owners flocking to the stands to find out how Yellow Pages and White Pages can help to grow their business.

Luke and Deepak at the Yellow Pages® stand

Visit www.yellowadvertising.com.au or www.whywhitepages.com.au for more information.

This year Sensis is sponsoring a series of lunches for members of the Sydney Chamber of Commerce. After two of these lunches, it’s really pleasing to get feedback from this diverse audience that we’ve shared a few things about consumers, small businesses and advertising that they didn’t already know…and actually wanted to know!

I mean, let’s face it, how many times have you turned up to a seminar or lunch only to walk away thinking, I’ve just been robbed of two precious hours in my life and I should demand a refund! I’m not saying Sensis hasn’t been guilty of this in the past… we’ve had our moments like any large business given the opportunity to put someone on the soapbox. But we’re starting to use opportunities like this to – and don’t gag here – help people.  So we asked the Chamber what their members wanted to know to about digital marketing.

And as the chicken and beef mains made their way around the room, our head of Yellow Pages® Digital, Sandeep Baruah, explained that the future of digital marketing in business will see a range of new applications at the disposal of the marketer. The question is what opportunities do they really present to increase brand equity and a company’s bottom line?

For some business, just knowing where to start is daunting in itself.

Sandeep unlocked some of the mystery around digital marketing tools such as:

• Social networking sites
• Search engine marketing
• Search engine optimisation
• Content syndication
• Mobile internet and
• Mobile codes

And he gave the audience a realistic check-list to help them make decisions about their digital marketing strategies:

• Who are my customers and where are they looking?
• What media are they accessing that influences their buying decisions?
• Which of these channels can I use to engage my customers?
• How can I use new technology to integrate campaigns and content across different media?
• Finally, what return am I actually going to see from this investment and how will I measure it?

Answering these questions will help any business go a long way to ensuring that they’re not simply swallowing the hype around new ways of reaching consumers, or putting all of their eggs in one basket.

According to Gerry Sutton, Sensis’ Chief Operating Officer, the Yellow Pages® and White Pages® directories are winning for buyers, sellers, investors and the Australian community.

WA:    Gerry, thanks for your time. You must have been busy since taking over the Yellow Pages® and White Pages® in May.

GS:    You bet. We’re right in the middle of the Yellow Pages® metro sales campaign, and the White Pages® has just kicked off its new campaign. So I’ve been all over Australia… meeting our people and our customers.

WA:    What are your initial observations about the Yellow Pages® and White Pages®?

GS:    Well, as you know, I’ve been very close to these businesses for a long time now. So I can’t give you a true ‘outsiders’ view. But I would say there are three things that have always struck me about our directories.

First up, this is a significant business. Yellow Pages® and White Pages® earns about $1.75bn in revenue and meets the needs of millions of buyers and almost 600,000 advertisers. The bulk of those advertiser customers are Australian small and medium businesses.

Secondly, it’s a real people business. Most advertising connects brands and markets. We’re bringing real people – buyers and sellers – together. Two people at a time. We’re about generating phone calls and store visits from people who are ready to buy right now.

And the way we work with our customers. It’s all person to person. Managing this business is about working with thousands of people to meet the very specific needs of millions… every day.

Thirdly, it’s a very sophisticated business. Yellow Pages® advertisers now reach out to potential buyers not only through the print directories, but an extensive online, voice and mobile network that includes brands like Yellow Pages® Online, Yellow Pages® Mobile, 1234 and Whereis®. And, now, Yellow Pages® listings can also be searched for through third party sites like Bing Maps, Google Maps and Yahoo! OneSearch, which is Yahoo!’s mobile search application.

There are few other media businesses that have broken down the barriers in the way Yellow Pages® has.

WA:    Gerry, you’ve talked about a back to basics approach. What do you mean?

GS:    As I’ve said, this is a real people business. We’ll grow by constantly getting better at meeting our customers’ needs. For us that means more information more easily for buyers and more customers for our advertisers. Do that well and we’ll grow satisfaction, usage, advertiser uptake and, ultimately revenue. It’s that simple.

I’m a big fan of customer satisfaction metrics. They’re no-holds-barred feedback on whether you’re doing the right thing by the customer. And it’s been gratifying to see both buyer and seller satisfaction rise strongly in recent times.

We’ve achieved that by really focussing our attention on customer needs. From the info-rich ad program, which helps advertisers produce more effective advertising, to metered ads, which help them understand ad performance. We’ve launched new services like Yellow™ in the car in nine markets as well as White Pages® Mobile. We’ve added new content products to Yellow Pages® Online and White Pages® Online. These content products help buyers by giving them more information and advertisers by giving them a stronger presence.

And, you know what? These content products have taken off. Take the White Pages® Online Package product for advertisers. Advertiser uptake has gone way beyond our expectations. This one product is almost solely responsible for White Pages® Online revenue tripling in two years.

That’s what I mean by back to basics. Deliver what the customer wants. Do that well and everything else will pretty much look after itself.

WA:    What about usage – particularly print? It’s a pretty hotly debated topic in the industry.

GS:     The Yellow Pages® print directories are valued highly by many Australians. According to Roy Morgan, almost 7m Australians use them every month¹. About 4m of these print directory users are also daily Internet users². These are people who use the Internet all the time, and yet they still see value in using the print directory. After all, it can often be quicker to find and compare businesses in print. At the other end of the scale, about a third of Australian households don’t have Internet access, according to the ABS³. For them, print directories could be their only access to information on local people and businesses.

In saying all this, however, there’s two really important points I need to make.

Firstly, I think the advertising community needs to get beyond this print vs online discussion. We live in a multi-channel world now and the whole print vs online debate is pretty dated.

So we’re really focussed on the usage the combined network delivers our customers. As I’ve said, unique usage of Yellow Pages® print is almost 7m a month⁴. At the same time, usage of our digital network is about 4.8m a month⁵. And unique usage of the third party sites we have arrangements with is about 4.5m a month⁶.

And Yellow Pages® advertiser listings can be searched for through all these services.

Secondly, usage maybe the word on the industry’s lips, but it isn’t, on its own, the main game.

Our customers are interested in winning business – emails, phone calls, store visits and so on. So conversion becomes really important. How many of those users contacted me and how many of them buy? How many leads is my advertising generating for me?

We know from years of research that about 90% of buyers using the Yellow Pages® directory go on to contact a business and about 72% of them buy⁷.

There’s few, if any advertising businesses that can deliver the volume of users and high conversion – in short, the numbers of leads – that Yellow Pages® can.

But now we’re getting more granular with this. As I said, we’ve introduced the info rich advertising program to help our customers create more effective ads. This helps them convert more users into callers.

And we’ve introduced metered ads so our customers can get a really strong sense of not just usage but of the actual calls they’re receiving.

In the end, these numbers – unique usage across all the directories, sites and services, conversion, number of calls – all matter to our customers. Not how’s print doing against online.

WA:    So, Gerry, where do you see the future for directories?

GS:    That’s a good question. I couldn’t begin to answer it completely in a short interview. But here’s a few thoughts.

Directories advertising is traditionally about significant events in a person’s life… weddings, buying a house or car and so on, or unplanned events such as a breakdown of some sort.

And that’s still the major driver of usage. But I think that with the integration of directories content, maps and mobiles into local search, we’ve been able to create a more day to day whenever, wherever you are proposition. Something you use to find your way around every day.

That’s why I think local search and directories is such an exploding market. If you look at usage across all local search sites, it’s grown massively over the last few years.

And I think we can get much better at using our directories to make life easier every day. We can make the whole cross-channel experience much more seamless, with print, online, voice and mobile all talking to each other in different ways.

And we can add sat nav, point of sale scanning and so on.

It won’t matter where you are or what you’re doing, you’ll only ever be a few clicks away from whatever you need.

I guess the other thing I’d add is a comment about digital TV. As you know, I’ve been involved in the digital TV industry for many years. And I’m really interested in seeing how local search and digital TV come together.

But that’s a few years away yet.

WA:    Thanks a lot Gerry.

1: Roy Morgan, Single Source Australia. Average monthly unique users, Yellow Pages® print. April 2008 to March 2009. Base: Austalians 14+
2: ibid
3: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Household Use of Information Technology, Australia, 2007-08
4: Roy Morgan, Single Source Australia. Average monthly unique users, Yellow Pages® print. April 2008 to March 2009. Base: Austalians 14+
5: ibid.
6: ibid.
7: Percentage of serches conducted using the Yellow Pages® Directory that resulted in a business or supplier being contacted. Independent research of people aged 18-64, conducted by TNS in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaeide and Perth, January – March 2007 and July – December 2007.

Gerry Sutton, Sensis COO, and Robert Rath, CEO of Sensis China, talk about the achievement of a major milestone for Sensis.

WA:    Hi Gerry and Robert. This year’s financial results contain a real milestone for Sensis. On a reported basis, Internet advertising revenues, including online and mobile, grew by 47% to reach $502 million. So we’ve hit half a billion dollars in Internet advertising revenue – the first Australian owned and operated company to do so, I believe.

GS:    It’s a great achievement. Fourteen years ago we entered the online space with the first online directory in the world. Like everyone at the time, our people had high hopes, but no real idea where digital media would take us. To stand here now and see an audience of millions, well over 100,000 Australian online advertising customers and half a billion dollars in revenue is really satisfying.

RR:    I feel really privileged in a way. I’ve worked closely with the Yellow Pages® and White Pages® teams for a long time, so I’ve got to see that business grow. Now, I’ve had the chance to play a role in the birth of Sensis China. It’s fantastic.

WA:    How has Sensis achieved this result?

RR:    Gerry, I think we’ve achieved growth in China and Australia in two very different ways. One is pure start up while the other is extending a traditional media business. What do you think?

GS:    I agree. In Australia, we’ve integrated digital into the existing Yellow Pages® and White Pages® businesses. It’s been a way of adding value to an existing proposition for both buyers and sellers.

RR:    And, in China, it’s pure online start-up. I saw an interesting statistic the other day. In the USA, they have about 2,000 directories for every thousand people – a 2:1 ratio. In Australia, it’s more like 1:1. But in China, there are only about 20 directories for every thousand people. And, of course, we’re not in the directories market in China.

WA:    Can you point to any defining moments over the years?

GS:    A few years ago, we changed the business model for Yellow Pages® Online. In the beginning, it was a separate business to print with a different sales force. We then integrated the two businesses. If you advertised in print all your content went online. A simple tick the box solution. You could then sign up to enhanced content and position online if you chose to. The minute we did that, online customer numbers skyrocketed. And it was great for buyers too because it put more content into the online directory.

Once we’d integrated the print and online directories, we set about extending what we call the Yellow Pages® network even further. Firstly into our own services like Whereis® and 1234 and then into third party services like Google Maps and Bing Maps. This has added enormous reach for our advertisers and made cross-platform advertising simple for them.

The other thing that comes to mind is much more recent. In my other interview with you, I mentioned the White Pages® Online Platform and how that product led to a real growth spurt in customer uptake and revenue. Thanks to that one product White Pages® Online has tripled in two years and doubled in the last year.

Actually, White Pages® Online Platform flags another big milestone that hasn’t happened yet. This year we’ll complete our systems and process transformation. We actually turned part of it on for White Pages® last year. And the new systems meant we were able to produce the White Pages® Online Platform product in just a few days. Under our old legacy systems, it would have taken weeks.

WA:    So White Pages® Online Platform is a sign of things to come?

GS:    That’s right.

WA:    Robert, what have been the big moves for you?

RR:    Of course, our China investments are only about two years old, but there have been some big wins already. Clearly we’ve invested in the right businesses. We’ve integrated them well, which can be seen in the great way our people are working together: and the team has delivered on expansion plans, like the Soufun 100 cities program. As a result, these investments are delivering really exciting growth.

WA:    So, where to from here?

GS:    I’ve already mentioned our transformation. This will have a huge impact on the types of services we can deliver and the way we deliver them. On that score, I do want to acknowledge one thing. People forget that everything we’ve achieved in our online directories has been done on twenty to thirty year old legacy systems. To be honest, it’s been a real struggle at times and our people have done a fantastic job to deliver what they have. The future’s going to be very different.

RR:    In China’s case, we’ll keep doing what we’re doing. Looking for opportunities for geographic expansion and looking for new services we can deliver to our customers. We’ll also focus more and more on the mobile space, which is starting to emerge. It’s an exciting time.

WA:    Thanks Robert. Thanks Gerry.

Earlier today, the Yellow Pages® earned a mention in Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s opening address to the 45th ALP National Conference. The story our PM told highlights the enormous social value these directories bring to the community.

You might be surprised to know that Australians turn to the Yellow Pages® and White Pages® directories about five million times a day¹.

Every one of those five million or so searches is a story. It might be a story about contacting a loved one. Or getting in touch with a mate you haven’t spoken to for years.

It might be about an Australian getting the help they need from a business, organisation or government department.

And, just as importantly, it might be about a small business owner finding the customers that are so important to the livelihood of her business and employees.

What might not surprise you is that the people at Sensis love these stories. They’re the source of pride that gets us to work every day.

And it’s fantastic when we hear one of those stories recounted by none other than our Prime Minister.

In his opening address to the ALP National Conference yesterday, Prime Minister Rudd told the story of 18 year old Matthew Jenkins. Matthew finished school at the end of last year and had worked hard to find an apprenticeship… sadly without success.

Then Matthew saw a piece on the news about Mr Rudd’s visit to CO-WYN Building Contractors in Bankstown NSW. According to Prime Minister Rudd:

Good on you Matthew and CO-WYN. We’re really proud we could help.