With consumers using more social media, mobile applications and the Internet, Yellow Pages Income Fund is planning a digital makeover.
"We’re going to look at repositioning our brand, repositioning the logo to be more representative of this new digital universe," president and CEO Marc Tellier said Thursday.
Yellow Pages will also target small- and medium-sized businesses for more digital growth, after the fund announced Thursday that its fourth-quarter profit grew 24% to $124.6 million.
"The more content, the more information there is on a business, the more the consumer will engage," Tellier said. "The local search audience is a growing audience."
The Yellow Pages’ logo is a pair of fingers walking across a directory.
"Most companies would love to have the recognition of the ‘fingers’ that we have. I think there’s really an opportunity for it to be more reflective of the breadth of solutions that we offer."
Yellow Pages is on track to have 20% of its revenues in 2010 come from digital applications, Tellier said. But he hasn’t yet seen a turning point when digital and print revenues will be equal.
In its financial results, Yellow Pages said its quarterly profit amounted to 25 cents per unit, up from 19 cents per unit or $100.5 million for the fourth quarter of 2008.
However, the Montreal-based publisher of advertising directories said its fourth-quarter revenue fell 4.7% from a year before, dropping to $405.7 million in the final three months of 2009 from $425.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2008.
Yellow Pages will offer such services as reselling various search engines and having businesses pay to have their listing show up before competitors and more location-based information. Coupons and other deals will eventually be offered, said Tellier.
Ratings and reviews will be offered to small- and medium-sized businesses, but Tellier said they can’t be anonymous or include profanity and must have a minimum number of characters.
He resisted a ratings and review system for several years because he didn’t want to be "bleeding edge," but said they are now common in the digital world.
RBC Capital Markets analyst Drew McReynolds said Yellow Pages’ advertising base represents about 40% penetration of the roughly one million small and medium-sized businesses in Canada.
"Assuming a retention rate of 90%, the company must attract up to about 40,000 new advertisers per year to maintain a stable advertiser base," he wrote in a research note.
McReynolds also said Yellow Pages is well-positioned to make the transition from publisher to "leader generator as leads migrate online."
