Here is a recap of posts from last week, in case you missed any. Click below to read each post in full.

Digital Hollywood: Dumbing Down the Marketing Mix 

I’m just returning from the Digital Hollywood conference in Santa Monica where I moderated a session on online and mobile marketing analytics (fun stuff). The good news is that there was lots of excitement at the show surrounding evolving user behavior that’s driving shifts from offline to online media, online to mobile, and the interplay between them all. (read more…)

Dotmenu CEO Frank Blot: Converting College Diners Into Lifetime Customers

Acquiring customers at an early age and getting them to use your services or products through their various life stages has been an appealing strategy for everything from autos to cigarettes to newspapers. Can it apply to online food ordering when it starts from a college dorm? (read more…)

Different Views on the Yellow Pages Market

A couple of industry forecasts have been floating around lately. One that was working its way across the wires today got my attention. It suggests that the U.S. Yellow Pages market will contract by a mere 0.5 percent in 2009. This figure is quite a bit different from the 13 percent 2009 decline that The Kelsey Group forecast in March. As an author of TKG’s annual Global Yellow Pages forecast, I am reluctant to nitpick someone else’s view of the market, but the difference here is so big that I feel compelled to make a few observations. (read more…)

Interactive Media Necessity, Not an Option

Don’t take The Kelsey Group’s word for the fact that more marketers are switching some of their advertising dollars into the Internet. Here’s what eMarketer wrote a week ago. “In the wake of the global economic downturn, marketers worldwide are shifting more of their budgets into cheaper, more-measurable categories.” (read more…)

YPG Shows Modest Q1 YP Growth; RHD Declines Continue

Canada’s Yellow Pages Group reported fairly positive Q1 results today. From the earnings release: “For the first quarter, Adjusted Revenues in Directories increased by 4.7 percent to $354 million and Adjusted EBITDA grew 3.2 percent to $209.8 million. Excluding the contribution of Volt (YPG USA), Adjusted Revenues grew by 0.9 percent to $340.9 million in the first quarter of 2009. The Adjusted EBITDA margin was 59.3 percent, compared to a margin of 60.2 percent for the first quarter of 2008.”  (read more…)

Reform in Health Insurance for SMBs

Good news on structural assistance for small business — two days in a row? Can this be? Yesterday, I reported on the possible thawing in the secondary market for a popular type of SBA loans to SMBs. Today, the news, as reported by BusinessWeek, is that there has been new bipartisan legislation introduced into the Senate called the Small Business Health Options Program (or SHOP). (read more…)

Signs of Thaw in Small-Business Credit?

Small business has suffered at least as much as large business in the great credit crunch. Recently, however, there are signs of improvement specifically in the credit market for small business, as reported in today’s Wall Street Journal. (read more…)

Jivox Lauches Video Ad Management Tool for Publishers  

Jivox announced today that it will launch a new “publisher portal” that lets its publisher partners build a branded dashboard for launching and managing locally targeted video ad campaigns. For those unfamiliar, Jivox is an online video ad production tool and distribution network. Its publisher network consists of about 800 TV, radio station and newspaper sites, through which it reaches 75 million monthly uniques. (read more…)