I listened this morning to one of the best keynote addresses I’ve heard in a long long time at the Kelsey Conference. Scott Pomeroy, President and CEO of Local Insight Media (a portfolio company of four directory publishers in the US and the Dominican Republic) offered his take on the future of the directory industry.

He believes the future is bright but that the industry needs to embrace new ways of doing business. Amongst others:

• A publisher’s goal should be to put the advertiser’s message in the consumer’s paths, wherever they are going
• You do not need to own all platforms or the consumer experience
• You need to be the most efficient aggregator of traffic and advertising for the SMEs

What it means: in a fragmented online world, those are very sane words. You can’t see the online space with the same eyes as the offline one. Aggregation will be a key success factor. Having a retail and a wholesale advertising & traffic distribution strategy makes all the sense as well. Bravo!