Over the past six months, I have had the opportunity to spend some quality time with a number of ad agencies and marketers from Seattle to New York and numerous places in between. At WhitePages we are very proud of how we are changing the way people connect with confidence. And we are equally proud of the new advertising opportunities that are emerging (and succeeding for advertisers) through our long-term company vision. Read on for some thoughts I wanted to share coming from these meetings…
What does the white page phonebook and www.whitepages.com have in common?
- A common purpose: to help you connect with a person or business
- They are both free
Beyond that, little else.
What, you ask, are the differences?
The printed white pages phonebook is a bulky, paper-wasting, antiquated directory of land line phone numbers and physical addresses in a single geographic area (ever tried looking someone up in Oakland in a San Francisco phonebook?).
With over 90% of US adults’ residential, professional and customer-supplied email and cell phone listings on our site and popular mobile applications, WhitePages is the most widely used, trusted source for personal contact information today.
Millions of WhitePages users are becoming registered site members so they can add their email addresses and cell phone numbers, taking control of their contact information so they can be reached even if they’ve canceled their land line service. Most people are surprised by that number, but WhitePages has invested significantly in safeguarding people’s privacy with WhitePages’ blind relay features, freeing people to post their cell phones and email addresses knowing no one will see those numbers unless permissioned to do so.
We’ve also recently added Free Text Messaging from your computer and three new mobile applications which you’ve no doubt read about before on this blog (iPhone, BlackBerry and Android), and soon we’ll be launching a text messaging lookup service.
Why am I so excited to explain how we’re different from the printed phone book?
The name, WhitePages, has been associated with words like “wasteful”, “antiquated” and “local” for a long time, and it’s those associations that confuse potential media buying and advertising partners. They think we’re just a digital phone book—why would I need to advertise there?
With WhitePages recent re-brand, we have not only transformed ourselves to users, but added increased value to advertisers:
- Leading-edge, trusted brand offering privacy-centric listing and communication tools
- Integrated product launch sponsorship opportunities
- Advertising placements within our member listing applications (i.e. Add Your Listing)
- High reach (22MM unique users per month) to a loyal, fast-growing audience of affluent adults who rely on WhitePages in the midst of life changes and events such as moving, getting married and starting a business.
- Advanced audience targeting solutions:
- Behavioral targeting derived from business searches and usage levels
- Wireless carrier targeting
- Demographic targeting
-Re-targeting and other audience segmentation offerings using third party cookies
-Dynamic localization and personalization of display and text ads on results pages
- Updated, cleaner design with large-format IAB ad units, as well as high impact custom rich media offerings including the new OPA pushdown unit
And the biggest value we continually prove to our advertisers is IT WORKS. If you’re an advertiser or agency and have feedback or suggestions on how we can better serve your needs, We’d love to hear about it below.
Max
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
whitepages.com is very nice and easy to use. My only complaint is: why is it necessary for everyone’s age to be shown near their name and phone number? That is more private to many people than their phone number! I dislike this addition very much.
Sincerely,
Leebee Avital
Hello Leebee,
Based on extensive feedback from our members, attributes such as age range, occupation and company name are helpful in identifying the person they are searching for, especially if there are multiple results for a search. Also, we choose to display age ranges, rather than exact age, in light of privacy concerns.
Thank you for posting your comment!
Hi. I don’t know exactly where to leave a comment but I wanted to say that I am VERY impressed with the WhitePages.com site. I was looking EVERYWHERE for a phone number and after many futile attemps it dawned on me to look on the whitepages site. It was the only place I found the number! Thank you SO much!