Note: This post is the 8th in a series on Brand Building that highlights the approach that WhitePages has taken over the past 15 months to build and reposition its brand.
The following post was written by Ingrid Michelsen who is our Director of Advertising Strategy at WhitePages. She’s been working tirelessly to ensure that all of our site changes enhance or at least don’t negatively impact how we generate revenue on thie site. More information in the post below. Enjoy!
As WhitePages’ Director of Advertising Strategy and one of the ad sales department’s representatives on our internal Branding Committee, the company’s rebrand initiative posed a number of questions regarding how to stand for our new brand principles with 100% integrity for our site users, while also maintaining our advertising revenue streams (which, in turn, keep our service entirely free). A clean, user-friendly site isn’t necessarily at odds with advertising, but we were most likely going to need to make short term financial trade-offs in the hope that we would be able to drive long term customer loyalty and real marketplace differentiation—the best advantage an ad sales organization can have.
Redesigning a site for usability and “to clean up the ads” isn’t an uncommon exercise among ad supported Web sites. My past experiences with this kind of project (at four other ad supported publishers before WhitePages) showed me again and again that the short term changes are all fantastic just up until the checks stop rolling in. I have seen so many sites revert to old ways after a big site redesign that I was personally (cynically) extra open to all the early proposed ad placement changes “knowing” that nothing would be permanent—that we too would revert if we needed to.
But this project was, from the beginning, very different from past redesigns I’ve participated in. First, like all parts of our business, from new applications to user interface improvements, we used customer feedback and market research to help us to understand how to better display ads. Second, there was real company-wide commitment and cross-departmental input that would make sure we saw it through. Third, the design and marketing leadership teams were very clear with me and the ad sales organization: we do not agree that advertising success and user satisfaction are at odds. Maintaining a free site is core to being the Best Source for contact information—improving advertising opportunities would be one of the critical objectives, as would revenue ‘neutrality’ (no lost revenue as a result of the redesign).
Since we’d received favorable feedback from consumers and advertisers alike on our existing ad placements, the design changes we were making were much more centered on improving usability and updating our image. But, we did make some improvements that negatively impacted some advertising placements.
For example, by removing all the navigation tabs to “People Search”, “Business Search”, “Reverse Lookups” and “Area/Zip Search”, we essentially eliminated a very popular custom search advertisement. This particular ad unit was a strong performer for at least three of our long term advertisers, but we really needed to radically simplify navigation and get back to being what we are: a fast, easy, trustworthy search utility site. By the way, those three advertisers are all aware of the change at this stage, and we’re getting ready to test new units that will hopefully perform even better for them.
On the plus side—and this is huge—the new site design is so clean and un-cluttered, our large display ads really pop. And all the integrated text links are easier to identify and read (and click on!) The new logo and color scheme also do so much to update our look & feel that I am confident it will be easier for our advertising prospects to envision their brands on our site. In essence, we’re more aligned with our advertisers.
I also had the task of applying our Brand Platform and principles to all the ways we engaged with our other customers: advertisers. The way the ad sales organization saw it, all of our interactions in the advertising industry, our proposals, our sales presentations and our rate structure, all had to be reviewed and updated to ensure we were Stewards of Trust, provided Intuitive Experiences, that we endeavored toward Relevant Innovation in our ad products, and, ultimately, that we were the Best Source to achieve our advertisers’ marketing objectives. As a result of that review process we’ve redesigned all of our sales materials, reorganized our sales support organization to align everyone more directly with our advertisers’ needs (for example, we combined campaign technical operations with account management into one role, working side by side with the account executives and advertising clients), and we simplified our ad serving infrastructure to ensure we can remain the fastest trafficking and optimization team in the industry. Maybe not as sexy a set of changes as a total site redesign, but we’re already seeing client satisfaction dividends.
All in all, I’ve been so impressed with our ability to balance user experience with our advertisers’ needs, and am proud to be in an organization that recognizes how critical it is to approach the design of an ad supported service from all customers’ perspectives. I hope you think so too!
Please feel free to email me or comment on this blog post and let me know your thoughts.
Ingrid
Other Brand Series Posts:
The Series Introduction: WhitePages Site Redesign
Market Research and Analysis
Strategic Brand Platform
Defining our Visual Identity
Explaining Branding to Employees
Usability Testing
Launching the new WhitePages Site!
Related posts:
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Ingrid, it’s good to see WP striking a nice balance & collaborate on best interests of both the users and advertisers. It seems to be an ongoing battle with lots of publishers that just are not able to agree and both sides suffer…going forward, lots of companies have been successful developing social media aspects of their businesses, which creates a host new challenges…i.e. no interdepartmental issues since it’s the actual users that publish the content…something to look forward to as that medium grows!
Since it appears that you have to register to use WP now, I’ll be going somewhere else.
Count me a Former Daily User (15-20 lookups a day).
Sorry to hear we are going to lose you!
Just to be clear, WhitePages only requires free registration (to become a site member) when you want to view an exclusive listing on our site. There are still millions of listings you can view without becoming a member. Also, membership allows you to create your own controlled, privacy-protected (via a relay system) personal email or phone listing.
I hope you’ll consider coming back to us soon, and thanks for your comment!