The Marketing Bureau

by Brian H Meredith

Just got a call from Yellow Online (www.yellow.co.nz) where we (The Marketing Bureau Ltd) have had a Gold Listing for several years now. Bottom line was an attempt to double our monthly online advertising cost.

Yellow advised that there was a system upgrade a couple of years ago which increased traffic to Yellow Online and also increased advertising rates. However, apparently, a bunch of advertisers, including us, were missed at the time and we were not asked to authorise an upgrade (i.e. a rate increase).

“So, Brian, can I have you authorisation to upgrade you and increase your monthly cost from $55 to $110? Oh, and we need to finalise this by this afternoon”

What? After being "missed" by Yellow Online for two years or so, now we have to decide by this afternoon?

I advised the rep that we had not, in fact, had a single enquiry from the Yellow Online site for as long as I could remember, which I estimated to be about 2 years. I asked why she thought I should double my cost exposure for a product that had delivered not a single enquiry, much less any incremental business.

Best she could come up with was that perhaps the content of our online entry needed looking at.

And sure, I would be happy to do that but any tweaking of the content would need to have a pretty significant effect to take zero inquires (nil, nought, zip, zilch) to enough inquires to result in conversions that would recover our doubled cost, let alone deliver a nett surplus.

But just in case our content is flawed, might I ask you, dear reader, to take a look at it and let me have your own comments? You can email them to me here.

Thanks in anticipation of your feedback.