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Gates on Everything Moving Online

To those of us who have been toiling away trying to explain the benefits of targeted, measurable, interactive advertising: Bill Gates is on our side.

He pulls no punches, and believes that the shift will be ahead of schedule, and not smooth.

Yellow Pages: doomed.

Newspapers: doomed.

Traditional TV ad models: doomed.

And all sooner than people think.

While his linebacker, Steve Ballmer, might have said as much already, the point is important, and worth driving home. An excerpt:

"When you say something like 'plumber' the presentation you get will be far better than what you get in the Yellow Pages," Gates said. "After all, we know your location and so we can cluster [results] around that. ... Yellow Page usage amongst people in their, say below 50, will drop to near zero over the next five years."

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News Tags: Gates, comments, Online
About the author:
Andrew Goodman is Principal of Page Zero Media, a marketing consultancy which focuses on maximizing clients' paid search marketing campaigns.

In 1999 Andrew co-founded Traffick.com, an acclaimed "guide to portals" which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.