PrintAN INTERVIEW WITH:
ALFRED MOCKETT, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
DEX ONE
CORPORATION
Dex One is a leading marketing solutions provider helping local business and consumers connect. The company provides integrated print and digital solutions to help its customers generate sales. Dex One's locally based marketing consultants offer a broad network of local marketing solutions, including mobile, Internet search, social media and print.
Q: You earned a great reputation as a technologist from your days at BT and American Management Systems. Why would you join a yellow pages company?
AM: This is not a yellow pages company. Dex One is a multi-media local search company. We are the absolute best at connecting local business with consumers. We facilitate trade to satisfy consumers’ needs and help local businesses grow and thrive.
Q: Now, you’ve been on board for several months. You certainly must have had some time to think about priorities to bring Dex One to the next level?
AM: I set three priorities. Craft a compelling vision for the future; articulate a strategy to deliver on that vision; and underpin that strategy with some robust business plans on which we can execute.
We define our strategy as business presence. To help customers confront the inestimable shift from print to digital by managing their entire digital footprint as they reach out across the web; delivering them digital leads; and leveraging social platforms.
Q: When you talk about digital solutions, etc., how does that differ from Google, and Yahoo, and other social media sites that are proliferating all over the place?
AM: They don’t have what we have. We have feet on the street. We have a sales force of fifteen hundred professionals working directly with customers. They have long-standing relationships with business owners and are pillars of the local community. They live and work there in the communities they serve and understand the local business environment.
Q: What is that local search market? Where is it today? Where do you think it’s going tomorrow?
AM: Recent reports show a local search is now at least forty percent of the total search universe. And the fact is that proportion is growing. Local search is more than just a telephone number or a name lookup. It’s about providing relevant content in a timely, accurate and consistent fashion.
Q: Dex One just launched a new consumer digital search solution. Can you tell me about that?
AM: We just released an application for the iPad. It’s now available in the app store for free, and covers more than 25 major markets across the country, including Chicago, Denver, New York, Las Vegas and Washington, DC. And within those, we have very sophisticated, very user friendly capabilities for connecting with the business we love to engage with.
Q: I understand this solution has local community information, events, or you name it, it pretty much has it all.
AM: Yes, certainly. The market is telling us that just pure search is no longer enough. It has to be relevant search, and it has to be a rich experience, rich in texture. Social media is the search of the future. We will need to add rich context around a search experience that includes ratings, reviews, and recommendations from “friends.” It’s not just enough to provide a list of plumbers in your local area.
Q: Does this mean the yellow pages is really yesterday’s story, the actual printed book?
AM: Our print directories are far from yesterday’s news. While high-speed Internet is readily available in our major metro markets, it is not as prevalent in most of our tier two and three markets. Print directories remain an important part of the local search equation in these places and generate a high-volume of leads for our customers.
Q: Let me ask you a personal question. When is the last time you used the yellow pages?
AM: Just the other day. I wanted to buy some cigars, and I needed to find a shop close to our offices. It was very quick and efficient.
Q: Can you paint a picture of the future on a couple of different levels? First off, let’s go back to the digital product suite that you and others at Dex One talk about.
AM: The future will involve a proprietor of a small or medium size business having a digital dashboard in front of them. Through that digital dashboard, they will order services, configure those services, adjust their marketing investment and get real-time reporting showing how the program is performing.
Behind that digital dashboard will sit three engines. The first engine is a digital lead generation engine, which drives customers to their door. The second one is a digital presence management engine, which will make sure that everything out on the web is accurately representing their set of capabilities. And thirdly, there will be a social media engine, which will make sure their profile and other related content appears across Facebook, Twitter and other destinations where people seek recommendations for local businesses.
Q: Let’s focus on lead generation because when it comes to local retail it’s all about leads and making sales.
AM: What has made the traditional yellow pages so successful is that the lead is generated right at the point of sale. Generally, anybody that opens up the book has already made the decision to buy. It’s a question from whom do I buy. And so we get a very high conversion of leads to sales, which makes that a good quality lead.
Now when we look at generating digital leads, first of all, we have to generate digital clicks and then convert those clicks to leads. On a broader scale within the, sort of Google empire, it probably takes twenty clicks to convert to one lead. Because we use very sophisticated search algorithms that hunt out the best leads and the best products, we can get that ratio down five to one. So that means a click coming from our proprietary search engines, DexKnows and DexNet, are much higher quality leads.
Q: Back in February you touted a new bundle -- Dex Guaranteed Actions -- as a game changer.
AM: Dex Guaranteed Actions is indeed an industry first. In fact, it is probably the first guaranteed performance advertising product in the history of the industry. This is transforming the nature of the relationship between us and our customers.
It’s transforming the discussion that takes place. It is a shared risk, shared reward system. It’s Dex putting its money where its mouth is. It’s saying we have such confidence in our ability to generate leads, let’s work out how much you can spend Mr. Customer, how many actions you expect for that, and we will guarantee that is exactly what you get from us.
In our early trials, we’re meeting our commitments more than ninety percent of the time.
Q: Wall Street still seems to be somewhat skeptical of your long term prospects, what are they looking for?
AM: The fact is that no matter how successful we are with the product portfolio, Wall Street will not sit up and take note until we address three issues. One, the double digit decline in advertising sales. Two, the customer declines; and thirdly, stabilizing EBIDTA.
Q: So what are you doing about those three things?
AM: There’s no overnight fix for those things. The fact is we’re in the middle of a period of discontinuous change within the industry. This isn’t just a Dex One challenge. It’s a global industry challenge as it migrates into the digital world. The first thing we must do is expand our digital product portfolio, so that when people make the conscious decision to migrate from print media to digital media we have all the pieces in place to capture more of the shift in spend.
Q: You have a career track record as a technologist. What have you learned about this industry that you most draw from your experience to apply here?
AM: It’s going to take a massive cultural shift. The fact is the culture of a directory publisher is very different from the culture of a technology player. We have to become preoccupied with speed to market. We have to be preoccupied with listening to our customers and responding to their needs, as opposed to creating products, designing and then convincing a customer to buy them.
As I mentioned earlier, we’re in a period of discontinuous change. What we have is convergence of two very powerful forces; rapid advances in technology and changing demographics. Each demographic accepts and adopts technology differently. So nothing in our history tells us where to go forward. There’s a great opportunity for value creation in these periods of discontinuous change, if you get it right. And rest assured we will get it right.