As you may have noticed, since the last few days of 2008, I took a brief Christmas break from blogging, while reflecting on the year gone by, and the challenges of the year ahead.

At the same time, I’ve been considering options about what I’ll be doing for a living in 2009 and beyond. I’ll spill the beans next week, but the decision is made and I’m starting my new role on Monday.

Don’t expect any major changes in content here: Sandlines is still fully focused on the changes that technology is bringing to the marketing discipline – and how the current recession plays to that. And more than ever before, Sandlines believes that relevance is the key to unlocking return on investment.

To what extent will marketing expenditure online be positioned as a ‘cost of sale’ rather than a separate budgeting line?

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Yell.Com: no to doordrops

No, not the end of Yellow Pages deliveries (yet), but I saw today that Yell have pulled out of a recently launched (August) venture to compete with asrecommended by publishing a consumer car insurance guide. The pilot went well, and 1.5 million copies a month were thudding onto doormats – and the plan was to grow that to 40 million.

My doormat is sighing with relief.

I think I hear the odd environment lobbyist cheering somewhat, too.

Can a magazine really be the right way forward to promote insurance…? A ‘service’ that means, almost by definition, that 11/12 of the audience will find it irrelevant each month as they are not in the renewal cycle. What on earth were they planning to say each month?

To paraphrase the old adage, “I know that 92% of my ad budget is wasted, I just don’t know with 92%.”

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Those ARE real people down there... just click and see!

Sandlines is idly pondering his No. 1 FAQ, namely “what happens next”?

I wrote a few weeks back about buzzword inflation in the form of Web 3.0, as a framework for speculation. For me, one of the key elements is going to be the increase in relevance online. And a key driver for relevance is location.
Location has long been a tricky beast to observe on the web. Local IP addresses (especially outside the US) are difficult to get right, leaving declared location (via registration data) the nearest thing we often have for an answer.

But people are pesky things, They’ve an irritating tendency (at least, irritating in this context) to move about – i.e. changing their location, therefore their criteria for relevance shifts with them…. pub vs office vs coffee shop vs living room etc.

That said, they’re pretty ingenious too. Witness the invention of devices such as the iPod Touch (on which I wrote this post) or the iPhone – or other (gasp) smartphones, PDAs, laptops, UMPCs or even the Asus EeePC. All with internet capabilities of varying levels of usefulness and usability.

And guess what? They are terrific at pinpointing location. If I use my iPod Touch with WiFi and go to Google Maps, it puts me within 500m of my actual location. And not a cellular transmitter in sight. So, an opportunity for better (ie more relevant) search results for web users; better targeting options for advertisers… a better online experience all round.

That still creates challenges: how do you generate the content that provides relevance online? It’s easy enough to get macro level local content, but the more granular stuff is much harder to obtain. Businesses old (Yell.com) and new (UpMyStreet, KnoWhere.co.uk) try, but I think it’s unrealistic to expect traditional approaches to editorial to fill the gap. You need to generate community - for communities. In other words, user generated content: reviews, listings, groups etcetera. It is happening, but there’s still a way to go.

Location is going to be critical to the Web 3.0 future. Watch this (local) space.

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