by Ingrid Michelsen, Director, Advertising Strategy, WhitePages, Inc.-

Over two years ago, before WhitePages launched its first mobile Web site, we were keenly aware of two things: people were actively accessing our Web site on mobile browsers in increasing numbers—and having what can only be called an incredibly bad user experience.

We also acknowledged that the WhitePages’ mobile Web audience was going to keep growing (people were clearly looking for an alternative to paying for 411 from their cell phones), so we launched a simple ad-supported mobile Web site (m.whitepages.com), which we maintained only to make sure our Web site redirects were up to date to cover all device types and browsers.

In the following year and a half traffic to our mobile site grew much faster than we expected, from 500,000 page views per month at launch to 7.4mm page views per month by December 2008.

With this level of scale the sales organization began to actively pitch mobile advertising to our clients and we invested time conducting a nationwide “Mobile Media Buying and Measurement” educational road show for agencies. We also worked closely with mobile ad network partners to get our banner ad fill rates up. From what I’ve heard from our mobile publishing peers, our approach and, more importantly, the slower-than-expected returns from those efforts, were not unusual.

Then three big things happened:

1.    iPhone
2.    3G
3.    WhitePages recognized a big opportunity

As for the first two, I’m pretty sure you’ve read enough on those subjects from more informed people than I, so I’ll stick to number three. My hope is that by openly sharing WhitePages’ high-level mobile strategy and tactics there might be something in here to inform your mobile marketing, ad sales and product decisions.

So, beyond the improved Web browsing experience thanks to the iPhone and 3G, in the middle of 2008, several events coincided and conspired to push WhitePages full force into mobile investment:

-    We learned new things about our customers
WhitePages completed initial market and customer research for its corporate re-branding initiative (eventually leading to our successful site re-launch last month),

-    We had seasoned mobile talent in our midst
WhitePages acquired Snapvine, a Seattle startup that created popular voice-blogging widgets that also happened to have several people with deep expertise in mobile, and

-    The app market took off
The iPhone app store launched (nearly a year after the iPhone was released).

How did our re-brand market research impact our decision to dive head first into mobile?

We learned that people trust WhitePages. People want WhitePages to be more innovative. People expect WhitePages information to be available anywhere and everywhere they go.

WhitePages is very lucky because most people (over 25) have heard of and used the printed white pages phone book. Because the white pages phone book is over 150 years old, WhitePages, the Web site, has had a leg up in gaining users’ trust, which is a very difficult thing to develop from scratch.

With that said, as an ad-supported Internet service, not affiliated with the phone companies, host to over 200mm unique individuals’ listings, and provider of reverse lookup and free text messaging we learned there was a downside to having a recognizable name: no matter what we did to differentiate our service, people still associated our brand with the antiquated, wasteful, printed book that provides local landline-affiliated information.

We saw this downside as an exciting challenge in updating our brand. So when we learned that our customers wanted and expected WhitePages to innovate, and that they want our information anywhere and everywhere, the mobile Web and mobile applications suddenly appeared to be the best way to deliver to our customers, while updating the old phone book image.

A mobile team was established, and a product roadmap approved, all within a month of the app store launch. Given that the mobile advertising market was and is still unproven, why was WhitePages’ executive team suddenly so eager to find dollars to invest in this space? The key shift was detaching the much beloved, pure ad supported model that we rely on in the Web environment from our mobile strategy. We needed to move quickly and build all of our apps with the option to be ad supported, premium, or both. When modeled out, paid apps showed clear short term potential to return the up front investment, but their success was in part dependent on our ability to provide a free trial version—a balanced, blended model that allowed us to scale to a pure ad supported model if the market opportunity appeared.

One month after the mobile product roadmap was approved the WhitePages mobile team released our first iPhone app. The immediate uptake of this app drove us to keep going (Android, Blackberry, SMS LOOKUP and more). The results?

8/15/08 – iPhone v. 1 released (free, no display ads, paid business listings)
=> Top 10 app in the reference category
=> Top 25 app among all free iPhone apps at launch
=> Expanded audience base to younger users

2/27/09 – Google Android Caller ID App released (premium)
=> Consistently top 10 app in the reference category

4/21/09 – Mobile Web site redesign (improved ad serving, paid business listings)
=> Over 13mm PVs per month; ~400% revenue lift

4/30/09 – Blackberry App released (premium with free trial)
=> Designed for business professionals, with title/company search features
=> Slower start because this product didn’t have an ad supported free trial option

7/7/09 – v. 1.3 iPhone released (updated functionality, ads on selected pages)
=> Maintained top 10 status in the reference category
=> Released with top tier advertiser as our launch partner

8/4/09 – Text LOOKUP reverse phone lookup service released (premium)
=> Brand new! Waiting for the results to roll in…

The combination of the growing mobile market opportunity and WhitePages’ disciplined investigation into what our service means to people and what they expect of us has led us down a path of innovation far faster than we ever intended, but is yielding incredible results. If you are figuring out your mobile Web and application strategy it is clearly critical to know your customers, find experienced mobile professionals, move quickly and know you can re-release new versions, and bake in the ability to easily test and scale winning monetization models – whatever they may be.

As Director, Advertising Strategy Ingrid oversees online ad products, custom creative solutions, and sales development for WhitePages, Inc., the leading source for free contact information online. Prior to WhitePages Ingrid was an Account Director at Avenue-A | Razorfish managing digital marketing initiatives for MSN, Netflix and Countrywide Financial. With over 13 years’ experience in online media Ingrid has worked primarily on the publisher-side as Global Director, Advertising Strategy and Operations for Reuters.com, Executive Producer, Internet Initiatives for Institutional Investor, Inc. and Sr. Strategy Consultant for E.W. Scripps and News Corp while at Xceed, a Web design and development firm specializing in online publisher monetization solutions.