Okay..it's been a long time since my last blog post. I've been busy. In addition to everything else I've been doing over the last several months, we sold our company. Something had to give. And blogging drew the short straw. Sorry. I'll be better in the future. I promise.
For anyone who's done this, you know that this can be like strapping yourself into a roller coaster that appears to have no tracks. My wife said: "Oh my God, it's like giving birth!" I'll have to take her word for it.
But, by and large, it's been pretty cool. I add the "pretty" qualifier because as lovely as lawyers and tax accountants can be, I've spent far too much time with them this summer. Sorry, "pretty cool" is the best I can do.
So, you ask breathlessly, "What's the scoop?" Well, we were bought by a public company, YPG in Canada, and I'm told I have to be careful about what I say. One more thing I'll have to get used to.
Yes, Enquiro was bought by a Canadian Yellow Page publisher..THE Canadian Yellow Page publisher. And I'm pretty pumped about that. Let me explain why.
These are not your Father's Yellow Pages...
When they laid out their vision of the potential of the Canadian online landscape, I realized early on that these are smart people. They've been buying up online properties at surprisingly brisk pace. Today, they sit with one of the largest online networks in the country, and the largest Canadian owned one. What's more, the properties they own all share one common trait, they're all there to deliver on intent. So if you define this by intercepting people who are ready to buy something, this is one powerful network.
Here's the nasty little secret about Canada. Canadian people are heavily wired. We spend more time on line than our US cousins. It must be those long winters. But Canadian advertisers are 4 to 5 years behind the digital curve. I don't know why. They just are. That creates a huge opportunity gap, and YPG realized that. So they wanted to do more than just wire together a network of intent driven properties. They wanted to introduce a brand new digital offering that ties together platforms, publishers and people. They called it
Mediative. That's what's now on my business card.
This doesn't mean the US clients we've grown up with will be replaced by new Canadian upstarts. We're going to continue aggressively growing our US footprint. It's hard to keep digital marketing within borders. This move actually helps us do that, with new bases of operations closer to our markets on the East Coast and in the Midwest.
I like to think that Enquiro has been a strong contributor to the search marketing landscape over the past 14 years (yes, I optimized my first site in 1996). This is, in some ways, a step in a new direction, but the reason I was interested in this partnership in the first place is that it allows us to ramp up many of our plans.