AT&T: "Small Businesses Stay Committed to Traditional Ads" and Why Their Free Nationwide Directory Assistance Won't Work

AT&T (NYSE: T) has made a couple of big announcements today: Free nationwide directory assistance if you listen to some ads and the results of a survey of small businesses.

Let's start with the free directory assistance. It works pretty well from my three tests this morning. The ads were short and meaningless; one was for a law firm and the other two were for some other company I can't even recall their name. The ads appear to be geographically targeted but there is NO call-to-action. I've already forgot the names of the companies and its been only a few hours. I am sure that AT&T will get a good sell-in on these ads as "new" or "revolutionary" but without a call-to-action, I can only imagine that there will be low rates of continued advertisers. Also, the ad appears immediately when you connect to the service. Why not wait until they figure out what I am calling for first? It would certainly be a stronger ad if they targeted it to what I am asking about, right?

The second piece of news out of AT&T are the results of a survey of small businesses. While they note the cities that the survey ran in, they don't note that these are all traditional businesses -- not online.

"Consumers are still going to the book as their primary choice for local business information, but they're also searching online before they buy," said Frank Jules, president and CEO of AT&T Advertising & Publishing, which publishes the AT&T Real Yellow Pages. Yea, right. When my mother moved online for local business information earlier this year, that should tell you that the Yellow Pages are dead.

Some additional stats from the survey related to online spend:

• Thirty-eight percent expect to spend more on Internet banner ads.
• Forty-three percent said they spent more on keyword-search traffic this year compared with last year, and 34 percent expect to keep increasing that spending next year.

It's important for AT&T to run these type of surveys so that they can sell-in the yellow page subscriptions to businesses. What they should be asking is people on the street how they are searching.... perhaps I should head over to Times Square and run some informal video surveys?