Speaking Sensis

A glittering array of digerati gathered last week to celebrate the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA) Awards. In what was a great achievement for the Yellow Pages mobile team, the Yellow Pages® iPhone app was nominated as a finalist in the Best Mobile Product or Service Award. Known affectionately as “The Amys” by the industry, the AIMIA Awards showcase work undertaken by Australia’s Interactive Media and Digital Content sectors across a broad range of categories and winning an Amy is a great accolade for any business.

Being a finalist allowed members of the Yellow Pages® team to strut the red carpet so there was no holding back on the fashion – especially with industry paparazzi on the loose.

Fashions on the field (L to R): Bruce Lund, Sally Davies, Julian Wong, Evan Ravensdale, James Simonetta, Alex Johnston and Michelle Sherwood.

But not even the comic styling of event host Mikey Robbins could settle our nerves as we watched and waited for our category to be announced. The Yellow Pages® app is an amazing product and we knew we were in with a real chance. And while the award went to 3 Mobile for its content portal, our team has a lot about which to be proud.  With more than 300,000 downloads since its launch in August last year, the iPhone app has been phenomenally successful. It has already connected more than a quarter of a million people with businesses, and boosted Yellow Pages® Mobile usage by more than 50%.

In fact, it took just two years for overall mobile usage to reach levels that online accomplished in five. That’s no mean feat and the team should be roundly congratulated for their hard work.

Undaunted, the team will be releasing more features and more useful functions in the coming months and we’re pretty sure that we’ll be front and centre at The Amys next year.

When I hear that a company has a digital strategy, I say – “so what; I want to know the details of the plan and when it will deliver something that makes a difference to people”. 

It is reassuring to know that right now at Sensis people are busy delivering the digital strategy to make a positive difference to advertisers and the people who use our products and services.  Of course there are some big plans, and exciting projects as part of this, but at the grassroots its also about continuing things such as improving the way we do the basics – like improving the online user experience.  This is something we work on continually using consumer feedback and historical site data.

A few of the latest improvements for Yellow Pages® and White Pages® online sites, set to go live in March include:

• the removal of the radio buttons used to select a business type search or business name search. Instead, yellowpages.com.au will automatically determine, based on the search term, whether the user was looking for a type of business, or a specific business, and handle the search accordingly. For example, a user searching for bunnings is obviously looking for a specific business. On the other hand, a user searching for used cars is clearly looking for a type of business. We’re making this change because we know that users don’t always notice the radio buttons, and consequently accidentally run the wrong type of search, leading to poor results;
• Auto-suggest functionality is being enhanced, with business names now also being suggested;
• Update of the business profile page for Yellow Pages® advertisers. We have updated the look and feel and added new video and photo tabs for advertisers who choose this type of ad. Plus, now when you print business profile pages you will get a cleaner and simpler result; and
• Extension of “my list” tool on White Pages® online from business search to residential.  My lists allows users to “select” advertisers contact details and create personalised lists which can be shared via email with others. 

There is more coming soon in the development pipeline including work on widgets, linking with facebook and twitter, plug-ins, brand name search, geocoding and more.  Stay tuned.

Hi. I hope you all had a great Christmas break. It seems like such a long time ago now, but I really appreciated the chance to get away and recharge the batteries with my family. Of course, we’re all well and truly back in full swing now and, as always, there’s a lot happening.

December half year financial results
On 11 February, Sensis’ financials for the six months to December (1H10) were reported as part of Telstra’s results announcement. You may have already seen the headlines. When adjusted for the transfer of Trading Post to Telstra Media, the sale of Universal Publishers and the rising Australian dollar, earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) was up 4.8% on flat (-0.1%) revenue.

This has been a challenging time for the advertising market. Our print directories revenue, for example, was earned at a time when the main media market (including online) declined by 8.5% and print advertising (including newspapers, magazines etc) declined by 12.5%ⁱ.

Sensis has delivered a good result in this uniquely challenged market. Underlying these results are two achievements I believe are worth highlighting. They say a lot about the progress Sensis has made in recent times:

• the growth of digital media and the evolution of our revenue mix; and
• the support we continue to receive from customers: the buyers and sellers who rely on our services.

Changing revenue mix: In recent years, we’ve broadened our horizons by expanding into both digital media and new markets, like China. In 1H07, 18% of revenue came from digital media. In 1H10 (just three years later) digital revenue has doubled to more than $300m and is now more than 30% of total revenue.

This is exciting progress. Our focus on diversity has dramatically improved the services we offer our customers and the underlying strength of our business for investors. As a result, Sensis today is the largest Australian-owned digital advertising business: a position further strengthened by our exciting investments in China, which now has the largest online audience in the worldⁱⁱ.

Continued strong support from our customers: A particularly pleasing aspect of this result is the enduring vote of confidence from our customers. Advertiser numbers remained largely intact despite the downturn. At the same time, advertiser satisfaction remained high. Advertisers gave the performance of our White Pages® and Yellow Pages® sales consultants a rating of more than 90% positiveⁱⁱⁱ, which is a tremendous ‘thumbs up’ for the work they’re doing. Finally, on the usage front, we continue to meet the needs of millions of potential buyers. The potential audience reach for Yellow Pages® advertisers grew to 11.5m unique users a month^iv, mobile usage grew by about 70%^v and MediaSmart online usage grew by 7.4%^vi.

Driving customer value with a commitment to innovation
Critical to achieving all of these objectives is our commitment to continually improve the quality of our services for both buyers and sellers. In just two months since my last update, we’ve been able to:

• launch Yellow Pages® enhanced business search in Whereis.com. Now, when you search on Whereis® for the address of a Yellow Pages® advertiser, you’ll see the business details of the advertiser pop up. A simpler experience for buyers and more potential returns for advertisers. In just one month, this new service has resulted in almost half a million new views of Yellow Pages® advertiser listings; and,
• launch the Yellow Pages® In the Car Book in a number of new markets following successful trials in Melbourne and Sydney. We’ve already seen ‘In the Car’ usage double year-on-year and there should be more growth to come as the books are distributed in these new markets;
• begin trials of a new ‘midi’ Yellow Pages® Book in Sydney. This smaller sized book is designed to be easier and more appealing for apartment owners living in high density areas;
• re-launch www.yellowadvertising.com.au – the Yellow Pages® advertiser site. This site gives advertisers ready access to the information they need to make the best advertising decision for them.

We’ve also seen positive activity in Location & Navigation. The Whereis® Navigator GPS service for mobile phones is growing rapidly and had a record month for subscriptions in December. There are also some early signs of a potential turnaround in the sat nav sector after a difficult 18 months or so.

And in MediaSmart, we’re working on phase 2 of our online targeting capability. When launched, advertisers will have the ability to target not just on the basis of user demographics but also online browsing behaviour (using purchase life cycle, life events and interest triggers across specific site categories, such as auto or small business). We’re also working to extend these capabilities to mobile. Ultimately, this will provide digital advertisers with the ability to deliver highly targeted cross platform advertising.

Behind the scenes, we’ve also switched Yellow Pages® over to the new iGen system. This is our largest ever technology innovation program and, after a few nervous weeks, the transition is now starting to show meaningful progress.

Its common knowledge major systems redevelopment projects are often difficult but, I must say, that’s pretty cold comfort when you’re going through one. While the program has been mostly successful, we are disappointed the upgrade didn’t go exactly to plan and we’re very conscious of the impact it has had in areas such as customer care levels.

Nevertheless, I’m pleased to say the biggest system challenges seem to be behind us and iGen is now stable and operating effectively. We have dedicated teams working through the backlog of change requests and service orders to bring us back to our usually high standards of customer service. And I’m also pleased to see our latest regional books – the first produced using iGen – are now being distributed.

Moving forward, we can look forward to delivering real customer benefits from iGen. These improvements will impact areas such as customer care, speed to market, search capabilities, product integration and content management – among many other capabilities.

Print and online directories certified carbon neutral
Recently, in a world’s first for a major directories company, we announced our print and online directories have been certified carbon neutral through the Australian Government’s Greenhouse Friendly™ program. We have committed to offset the carbon emissions of our directories through Greenhouse Friendly™ accredited providers and projects. At the same time, we have committed to reducing our operational greenhouse gas footprint by 5% year on year to 2012.

We also recently celebrated ten years of directory kerb-side recycling. This program has been an immense success. Recycling rates are up from 4% in 1999 to 96% recycled or re-used today. As a result, more than 175m directories have been recycled since 2000.
I’m incredibly proud of these achievements. Together, these two initiatives demonstrate not only our commitment to sustainability but our success in turning that commitment into positive action.

Federal Court copyright decision
Recently, a single judge (Justice Gordon) of the Federal Court found there was no copyright in the compilation of factual information in our White Pages® and Yellow Pages® print directories. ‘Factual information’ in this case refers to the names, numbers and addresses contained in the directories but, importantly, does not affect copyright in display ads. Not only is this outcome disappointing for Sensis and Telstra, it has far reaching implications for any business that invests in the development of compilations, such as customer lists, postcodes, TV guides, anthologies, racing information, and marketing lists.

We have been granted leave to appeal the Federal Court’s decision and are likely to do so. In the meantime, there is a critical assurance I want to make – particularly to our customers: our success as a business is not solely reliant on copyright protection.

For more than a decade now, Sensis has been operating in a competitive market in both print and online. In print, competitors have been copying our data for years in certain markets. And, in online, we’ve been operating in the same market as some of the world’s largest online businesses for the same period of time.

Despite this competition and the negative comments you occasionally read in the media, our business and, most importantly, the value we offer both buyers and sellers are stronger than ever.

It’s business as usual as far as we’re concerned. Continuing to build the returns for our customers, investors and the community is what matters.

All the best,

Bruce Akhurst

ⁱ CEASA, Main Media Report. June 2009. Note: 1H10 print directories results backdated six months to align sales cycles with the rest of the media market.
ⁱⁱ Clickz.com Web Worldwide http://www.clickz.com/stats/web_worldwide
ⁱⁱⁱ TNS, Sensis KPI Report, December 2009. Average monthly satisfaction score – July 2009 to December 2009
^iv Roy Morgan, Single Source Australia. September quarter 2009. Base: Australians14+
^v Omniture, December quarter 2009 compared to 2008
^vi Roy Morgan, Single Source Australia. September quarter 2009. Base: Australians14+

You may have heard of TrueLocal. In their words, they are an online business directory. As such, they compete directly with Yellow Pages® for the advertising dollar of local businesses.

So it’s not surprising to see them attack the value of the Yellow Pages® Book, which is used by millions of Australian buyers and sellers, in order to hopefully pick up some extra business for themselves.

For a business that has been in the market for a number of years now and has had limited success (Roy Morgan shows truelocal.com.au had an average of 249,000 users a month in the year Oct 08 – Sep 09, compared to 2.5 million a month for yellowpages.com.au),  it’s not surprising to see TrueLocal go on the offensive. They did it in June 2009 with a dedicated website and direct marketing campaign, they’re doing it now and we expect they’ll do it again.

But what is surprising, is that for a business whose parent is News Ltd, and synonymous with print publications, they make claims such as:

Gone are the days when these delivered directories were the only way to find a plumber, accountant or doctor. Some people still use them, absolutely. And they’re important for those who don’t have internet access. But [Clover] Moore is right in saying that today most Australians find businesses online – in fact 91.4 per cent do, according to a survey done by TrueLocal in conjunction with Coredata last year.

If you’ve looked at one of News Ltd’s 108 free, weekly, advertiser funded local newspapers recently, you might have noticed the classified ad section – where people might look for a plumber, accountant or doctor – is brought to you by TrueLocal.

And these 108 local newspapers are distributed to Australian homes each week– with no known way for people to be able to opt-out.

But what’s even more surprising, is that in the Victorian regional centres of Ballarat, Geelong and Colac, News Ltd and TrueLocal believe print directories are a valuable resource for the local community. So much so that they produce their own and deliver them to homes and businesses.

It seems TrueLocal will tell people anything to get one up on Yellow Pages® and further their own interests.

At Yellow Pages®, we use independent and credible research to demonstrate the value we deliver. You could say this is talking to our strengths or letting our results speak for themselves, rather than focusing on what our competitors are doing.

But sometimes you’ve just got to call a spade a spade and make sure the truth does get in the way of what some might consider a good story.

Yellow Pages® facts

Usage – the Yellow Pages® network (Book, Online and Mobile directories) is searched 13 million times by 4.5 million Australians each week. This includes 8.5 million searches in Yellow Pages® Books ⁱ.  We also give people the choice to request not to receive a book by calling us on 1800 008 292.

Carbon neutral –Yellow Pages® and White Pages® print and online directories have been certified carbon neutral through the Australian Government’s Greenhouse Friendly™ program. The carbon emissions created through the production of our directory products will be offset through Greenhouse Friendly™ accredited providers and projects in Australia.

Recycling – 96% of directories were recycled (75%) and re-used (21%) last yearⁱⁱ.

ⁱ Roy Morgan Single Source Australia, 14 years and above, last 7 day average, July 2008–June 2009.

ⁱⁱ DBM Consulting, Sensis 2008/2009 Recycling Measurement Program, June 2009].

With the 16th Annual AIMIA Awards fast approaching, voting has opened for the all new People’s Choice Award.  The People’s Choice category is exactly that – it’s your turn to vote for the finalist you feel deserves to be a winner of their respective category!

The finalist with the most votes wins and the exciting news is, of course, that our very own Yellow Pages® iPhone app is in the running. Get in quick to cast your vote on the digital industry’s brightest creations of the past year. Click on a link to look at the entry and cast a vote for your favourite. There is only one vote per person so make it count! Voting closes at 10.00 AEDT Friday 26 February.

To cast your vote go to:  http://www.aimia.com.au/awards/peoples-choice/

As announced on 3 February, Yellow Pages® is a finalist in the Best Mobile Service or Product Category. I will be frocking up to attend the ‘The Amys’ on Friday 5 March to find out who in the industry will be awarded for their exceptional work (and of course have my fingers crossed for Yellow Pages®). I look forward to seeing many of you there and I will bring you all the news, gossip and pics in the coming weeks.

 To learn more about the AIMIA awards click here http://www.aimia.com.au/isp/icms.isp?page=6636

Today, Sensis announced a solid first half year result for the 2009/2010 financial year, with EBITDA up 4.8% to $488m on a flat revenue of $974m.

According to Sensis CEO, Bruce Akhurst: “This is a strong result in a challenging market. As we advised previously, we experienced subdued sales conditions in our directories business but were able to outperform the local market and deliver solid market share growth in both print and online.”

“At the same time, the fundamentals of our business – the support we receive from the buyers and sellers who rely on our services – remain very strong. This is a great pointer to the future”.

Sensis delivered 3.5% YoY growth in the potential reach of Yellow Pages® advertisingⁱ by syndicating our advertisers’ content across a wide range of channels and brands. We also saw excellent growth in MediaSmart’s online display network reachⁱⁱ, high double digit growth in mobile usage and an average of over 4 billion page views per month in Chinaⁱⁱⁱ.

At the same time, customer satisfaction results remained high among both buyers and sellers.

Adding to Sensis’ strong business fundamentals was an ongoing investment in our underlying systems together with a wide range of successful new initiatives aimed at making our products simpler and more informative for buyers and more effective for advertisers.

Financial highlights
(Adjusted for Trading Post transfer, Universal Publishers sale and currency movements)
• Adjusted EBITDA up 4.8% to $488 million – strong performance in difficult market conditions
• Flat adjusted revenue down 0.1% to $974 million
• Adjusted expenses pre D&A down 4.5% to $487 million
• EBIT up 14.5% to $445 million

Market highlights
• Yellow Pages® & White Pages® print share of print media up from 19.6% to 21.3%^iv
• Australian online market share grew from 15.4% to more than 17%^v
• Global (China and Australia) online usage up to 4.3 billion page views per month^vi
• Total mobile usage up 76% to 2.5 million visits^vii
• Maintained strong customer satisfaction results - Yellow Pages® Online and White Pages® Online user satisfaction up 10 percentage points (pp) and 16pp since February 2008 and maintained scores of above 8.0 for Yellow Pages® and White Pages® advertiser satisfaction with our consultants

Operational highlights
• New White Pages® Mobile site delivered 600,000 monthly visits in only its sixth month^x
• White Pages® and Yellow Pages® iPhone apps delivered 475,000 visits to Yellow Pages® and White Pages® Mobile in December^xi
• Yellow Pages® in the Car directory sold into 15 new markets after success in Melbourne and Sydney
• Yellow Pages® and White Pages® print and online directories certified carbon neutral with carbon emission to be offset through Greenhouse Friendly^TM accredited providers

ⁱRoy Morgan Single Source Australia; average monthly unique users, 12 months to September 2009 vs 2008. Includes all services through which Yellow ⁱⁱPages® advertiser ontent can be searched for. Includes Yellow Pages® print, mobile and online, Whereis.com, 1234 and third party sites including Google Maps (not yet able to measure Bing Maps)
ⁱⁱⁱRoy Morgan Single Source Australia; average monthly unique users of all listed MediaSmart sites, 12 months to September 2009 vs 2008
^ivAustralian data from Omniture Site Catalyst: average monthly visits; Soufun data from Soufun; Sequel data from iResearch. All data relates to average monthly page views, September quarter 2009
^vSensis data and CEASA Main Media Report, Jan – June 2009 and previous. Compares like sales cycles, FY09 vs FY08. YPWP revenue backdated 6 months to allow for six month revenue recognition delay.
^viSensis data and IAB Online Advertising Expenditure Report, September quarter 2009
ⁱAustralian data from Omniture Site Catalyst: average monthly visits; Soufun data from Soufun; Sequel data from iResearch. All data relates to average monthly page views, September quarter 2009
^viiOmniture, SiteCatalyst; Average monthly visits December quarter 2009 vs 2008
^viii2Degrees Research, Yellow Pages® Online User Satisfaction Survey, November 2009. 2Degrees Research, whitepages.com.au User Satisfaction Survey, September 2009
^ixYellow Pages® KPI Report. Average monthly positive score out of 100 for each attribute over the six months to December, 2009 vs 2008. White Pages® KPI Report. Average monthly positive score out of 100 for each attribute over the six months to December, 2009 vs 2008
^xOmniture Site Catalyst, December 2009
^xiOmniture Site Catalyst, monthly unique visits, December 2009

Today is an exciting day for me. Actually, it is an exciting day for Sensis. Today we announce that our Yellow Pages® and White Pages® print and online directories are certified carbon neutral through the Australian Government’s Greenhouse Friendly™ program.

We have achieved this by offsetting the carbon emissions of our directories through Greenhouse Friendly™ accredited providers and projects in Australia. I am working for the first major directories company in the world to have its print and online directories certified carbon neutral, which makes me feel pretty good. Our carbon neutrality announcement wasn’t referring to our businesses operational carbon footprint (fleet, facilities and flights) – we’re taking responsibility for the full ‘cradle to grave’ impacts of the print and online directories. That’s the production, use, disposal and distribution of the directories. We’re talking around 175,000 tonnes of carbon emissions.

We know how many tonnes we’re taking responsibility for because we”ve commissioned environmental professional services company URS Australia to undertake a full life cycle assessment on the directories. In addition to offsetting the carbon emissions through Greenhouse Friendly™ accredited providers and projects in Australia, we are also announcing our target to reduce our operational carbon emissions by five per cent year-on-year. This means we’re working with people across the entire Sensis business to embed an understanding of what sustainability is and how they can reduce emissions in their areas of the business.

It’s great to be working for a company that is committed to taking a leadership role in corporate sustainability. Read more about this exciting news here: http://about.sensis.com.au/Sustainability/Environment/Our-Commitment-to-Climate-Change

Sensis’ new Yellow Pages® iPhone app has made it to the finals list 16th Annual AIMIA Awards. Our product is in the running for Best Mobile Product or Service and it is up against similar applications from the ABC, CommSec and 3Mobile. Known affectionately as “The Amys” by the industry, the AIMIA Awards showcase work undertaken by Australia’s Interactive Media and Digital Content sectors across a broad range of categories. The winners of the awards will be announced and celebrated on Friday 5 March 2010. We will be dusting-off our top hats and looking forward to the digital content industry’s night of nights. We also look forward to seeing you there. May the best mobile product or service win!’

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.

Charles Wright recently wrote in The Age how the benefits of search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) for one small business provided a far better return on investment (ROI) than advertising in the Yellow Pages®.

It’s easy to find one example of a business that’s been successful with any sort of advertising. The challenge is to find lots of them. Yellow Pages® has hundreds of examples of advertisers who get a majority of their business through Yellow Pages®. We even put some in our TV ad earlier this year.

Charles’ article was based on a simple assessment of ROI: cost of SEM outlay and the return in website traffic compared to the cost of advertising with Yellow Pages® Online and the subsequent website.

Where his case fell down is that it left out a number of costs a small business faces when gearing up for effective SEM and SEO activity.

These include the costs of building, hosting and maintaining a decent website, and possibly the cost of an SEO/SEM consultancy (or a significant time cost if you are able to do it yourself).

Sure there are online businesses that can manage all this and find customers. But there are a lot of businesses that can’t. Which is where the Yellow Pages® network can deliver real value.

Through its network, Yellow Pages® provides an effective multi-channel solution. With one Yellow Pages® ad, a business goes in the Yellow Pages® Book, Yellow Pages® Mobile, and the 1234 and Call Connect phone services.

In addition, Yellow Pages® also gives businesses a significant online presence by putting them in yellowpages.com.au, whereis.com and by making Yellow Pages® listings available to be searched on Google Maps and Bing Maps.

In fact, if you add up all these print, online, voice and mobile services, you find that Yellow Pages® advertiser content can be searched for through services used by almost 65% of Australians every month.

And that doesn’t include search engines. Recognising their significant value, we’ve made Yellow Pages® content not only searchable through the major search sites but we’ve optimised the content for search engines as well. That’s why over 2.5 million referrals come from search engines to Yellow Pages® Online every month.

People searching Yellow Pages® are buyers, not browsers. And they are often serious buyers who are ready to make a major purchase such as buying tyres for their car, booking an appointment with a dentist, booking a function at a restaurant or hiring a tradesman for work on their house.

The Yellow Pages® network helps puts businesses in more places customers are looking – including major online sites – with ease and convenience, leaving them to get on with running their business.