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

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.