On-line Marketing: pagesJaunes media

In 1946, the French Minister for Post and Telecommunications entrusted the advertising sales division for telephone directories in metropolitan France to the Office d’Annonces (ODA), a company owned by Havas. In 1998, France Télécom acquired ODA through its subsidiary Wanadoo. PagesJaunes then became publisher of the Pages Jaunes directories and associate publisher of the Annuaire (former Pages Blanches, or White Pages). Today, the PagesJaunes group, in which France Télécom has a 54% holding, has undergone spectacular expansion in general and professional telephone directories, but also in direct marketing and geographic services. It had a turnover of 1,061 million euros in 2005.

The group has a range of diversified activities, the main ones being PagesJaunes SA France; Kompass France, Spain, Belgium and Morocco; Mappy, a maps and route planning service; a direct marketing company PagesJaunes Marketing Services; PagesJaunes Lebanon; the Spanish telephone directory QDQ Média; the Moroccan directory, Edicom; and a 49% share in Editus Luxembourg, the Luxembourg telephone directory. Known in the past for telephone directory publishing alone – the group published 361 editions and distributed 69 million copies in 2005, and this is still its main activity – PagesJaunes is also increasingly known for its on-line internet services, due to the development of pagesjaunes.fr since 1997. Its young, sometimes provocative advertising campaigns have managed to convey an attractive image to the general public, as proved by the fact that 727,249 professionals chose one or several of the group’s media supports as advertisers in 2005. This excellent brand identity was also precious during the campaign to launch of the group’s new number for directory enquiries (118 008).

pagesjaunes.fr: 30% of total turnover
Fifth in terms of numbers of hits, pagesjaunes.fr is one of the most popular French websites, alongside Free, Wanadoo, MSN and Google. With 460 million pages consulted and 62 million visits for March 2006 alone, pagesjaunes.fr makes the group very different from other directory publishers in the world. “Telephone directory publishers usually make less than 10% of their turnover on the internet, whereas it accounts for nearly 30% of ours," explains Jean-Marie Guille, on-line business unit manager at PagesJaunes SA. “Of course, with Minitel being used in France as early as 1983, the general public and advertisers were already used to this type of medium. We were all the more prepared for this since at that time we were the advertising department of France Télécom, and had developed offers that now enable PagesJaunes to have a strong position on the internet.” He went on to say there is currently an annual growth rate of 40% in the use of pagesjaunes.fr. As for the 10 million or so connections still made via Minitel (3611), these are naturally on a downward trend. In line with these technological changes, PagesJaunes has constantly developed new services.

For instance, it has a new “mobile phone" version of its internet portal, where connections should increase due to the generalisation of 3G norms. On this point, it should be noted that pagesjaunes.fr is the only brand in France to have signed a referencing agreement with the three French mobile phone operators (Orange, SFR and Bouygues Télécom). They also provide live town information services, including weather forecasts and continuous webcam pictures, map and route planning services from Mappy, local search facilities on different themes and also connections to telephone directories around the world. Finally, among upcoming projects, apart from a complete overhaul of the pagesjaunes.fr portal planned for 2007, an interface will offer aerial photos of France, following an agreement with the IGN (French Geographical Institute).

Site creation services
With its strong audience and public awareness, pagesjaunes.fr is not only a directory, but also has all the ingredients of a highly effective advertising medium. According to the ISL Crédoc barometer for 2005, 82.4% of consultations of the PagesJaunes directory (printed, telephone or on-line versions) are followed by a sales contact, resulting in purchases in over half of cases (57.3%). A total of 619,913 advertisers chose at least on of the PagesJaunes media to communicate in 2005, and they estimate that they provide around 20% of their clients, according to the e-stat media study. From a simple module with a logo and 3-line description to a search context-sensitive advertising banner, pagesjaunes.fr has significantly increased its offer of services to advertisers (+10% in 2005). In a view to increasing its business by offering customer friendly technological progress, PagesJaunes has provided a website creation and hosting service since 1997.

The PagesJaunes production workshop has designed at total of nearly 40,000 websites (37,520 in December 2005). The latest service, En Savoir +, is the new generation of sites proposed by the telephone directory publisher. ‘It is a very well-structured form of site, with a relatively standard presentation for all the clients. The focus is on well-organized information. This means that users can easily find their way around all the En Savoir + sites they find on pagesjaunes.fr,” explains Jean-Marie Guille. The formula is simple, but very popular (20,000 sites created since 2004), particularly as these small websites benefit from a number of PagesJaunes’ innovative functions such as interactive maps from Mappy, a statistical function hosted by e-stat and free click-to-call technology for instant connection online, as a result of a recent partnership with the company eStrata, a specialist in internet telephone connections. As of April, pagesjaunes.fr has decided to extend this offer to all its clients who have subscribed to at least one module. The business unit’s manager concludes: “This is one of the key elements in our development. Our vocation is to enable small and medium-sized enterprises to have easy access to the world of internet.”