Local Advertising & Media Thoughts on digital local advertising from the Amdocs Advertising & Media team

BLOGGER: MOSHE KAMAR

Speaking with Nir Lempert at the event

There’s a lot of truth in Alan Kay’s famous remark that “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” While it might sound arrogant and overly ambitious, in the right conditions and with the right partners, there is no reason why we can’t create a better future for ourselves in this industry.

This thought was running through my head all day at the recent Innovation Day we hosted along with the Zap Group (formerly known as Golden Pages).  In fact, my good friend Nir Lempert, Zap Group’s president and CEO, is a prime example of how an innovative senior executive can transform a company so that it is ready to embrace the challenges of today and tomorrow and experience success.

But Nir knows, just as we do at Amdocs, that even if you’re a market leader, you can’t always go it alone or assume that you have all the answers in house.  That’s why we decided to hold the Innovation Day, where industry experts, start-up companies, local advertising experts from Amdocs and from the Zap Group, as well representatives from the media, could meet and share ideas.

Discussion at Amdocs Innovation Day

The main part of the day was devoted to two fascinating discussions, one based on the consumer mobile experience, which is where the industry is heading, and a second focusing on advanced sales tools to local advertising service providers.

The start-ups brought their innovative perspective to the discussion and got the chance to present their product. With venture capital representatives and members of the press also in attendance, it gave these start-ups an important networking opportunity.

For Nir and me, the day gave us the chance to identify some innovative solutions. Here at Amdocs, we definitely intend on following up some of these ideas, identify possible combinations of start-ups and other solutions, with the aim of expanding our offering to our Advertising and Media customer base.

In fact, it was such a good day, I’m prepared to make a prediction for the future: We’re going to see innovation, based on the solutions we talked about, serve leaders of local advertising  within the coming year. After all, as Steve Jobs said, “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

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BLOGGER: MOSHE KAMAR

This time last year I was trekking in the spectacular Torres del Paine National Park in Chile with my son. Hiking 30 kilometers a day with a 30-kilo pack on my back was not easy, but the views were worth it. Although we walked by ourselves during the day, every night we would join a group of trekkers and together we’d make dinner.

Torres del Paine National Park

Everybody threw in what they had. We’d bring rice, other people soup, others lentils and so on. In the end, we had a meal fit for a king every night. If we’d have been eating on our own, we’d have just been stuck with rice every night. And not only that, eating in company, swapping stories after a hard day’s walking, is the best way to forget one’s aching muscles.

What works in the forests of Chile is also true for the world of local advertising. No one company has the complete answer to the challenges facing our industry following the decline of print media and the move to mobile devices for search and purchasing of local services on the go. Which is why Amdocs, a leading vendor of software and services to local advertising publishers, and the Zap Group, the publisher of the top Israeli local consumer destinations in digital and print media, have joined forces to hold an Innovation Day with carefully selected start-up companies and other technology and local advertising experts. The day promises to be a very insightful and productive event, with discussions on such critical issues as creating a winning local experience in mobile media, and implementing sales productivity tools to streamline the value selling in local advertising market. In fact, I’m, already looking forward to blogging about it once it’s over.

As I said, we don’t have the all answers by ourselves to our industry’s challenges:  the need for new solutions in terms of richer, more interactive, relevant and instant experiences for consumers, and effective and diverse advertising products and sales tools. But by collaboration and partnerships between large companies, innovative start-ups and industry experts, I’m sure we can prove, as I experienced in those magical dinners in Chile, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

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