Salesgenie.com(TM) Super Bowl(R) Ad Scores on Ad Integration, Exposure, and Generating Return on Investment.

OMAHA, Neb. -- infoUSA([R]) (NASDAQ:IUSA), the leading provider of proprietary business and consumer databases, sales leads, direct marketing, and email marketing, today announced Denny Hatch, nationally-renowned author, publisher, editor and direct-marketing guru, praised infoUSA's Super Bowl gamble in his Business Common Sense newsletter (February 8, 2007, Vol. 3, Issue 11).

"It doesn't matter if [the Super Bowl] ads 'resonated among a group of ad executives,'" wrote Hatch, or were "funny" or "cute," he continued. "What was the ROI?"

In his column, Hatch outlined the five basic rules of advertising, with the ultimate goal of any ad as "return on investment (ROI)." He measured this year's Super Bowl advertisers to those standards, stating Salesgenie.com may be the "only Super Bowl ad with a chance of making money."

"Gupta's team created a thoroughly professional, 30-second commercial with a powerful offer - 100 free sales leads. Only a lunatic would say no," concluded Hatch. "Othe Salesgenie ad is the only one that made sense. In short, this is what real-world advertising is all about."

Hatch also touted the marketing genius of the Salesgenie.com landing page.

"Conventional wisdom called our campaign a gamble," said Vin Gupta, Chairman & CEO of infoUSA. "We felt strongly that our method of using the reach of the Super Bowl to target businesses in a new and different way would produce results. It is enormously gratifying not only to have been proven right, but also to see such an accomplished marketing expert like Denny agree our approach was a winner."

Salesgenie.com is an online sales leads & mail delivery system with a target market of nearly 30 million salespeople, small business owners and entrepreneurs.

Hatch's Business Common Sense column appeared as below:

February 8, 2007: Vol. 3, Issue No. 11

Super Bowl Ad Critics: A Cult of Know-Nothings

Don't Judge Advertising; Let It Judge You

Were the Super Bowl Ads Any Good?

The best and worst of the night.

I should note right away that I'm greeting this Super Bowl telecast with a total baditude. I hate the Colts (for beating my Patriots in the AFC championship game). I hate Peyton Manning (for looking like a whiny chump all the time). And I also badly injured myself before the game playing touch football (my hamstring is on fire right now). What could snap me out of my funk? Some epic, showstopping commercials. Uplifting. Emotional. This is what we want from our Super Bowl ads, yes? Something a cut above the everyday. Sadly, that's not what we got. With minor exceptions, the ads this year were disappointingly small and instantly forgettable.

--Seth Stevenson, Slate.com, Feb. 5, 2007

With few exceptions, I despise Super Bowl ads.

The only things that irritate me more than the ads themselves are the blathering bloviations of columnists and commentators who give their opinions the morning after on which ads were good and which were bad.

They are all dead wrong.

They haven't a clue what they are talking about.

Not one of them.

Let's start with five very basic rules of advertising:

Rule #1: "Your job is to sell, not entertain."

--Jack Maxson, freelancer, creator of the Brookstone catalog

Rule #2: "If it doesn't sell, it's not creative."

--Credo of Benton and Bowles, Chicago, in the 1930s

Rule #3: "Every time we get creative we lose money."

--Ed McCabe, president of BMG music club

Rule #4: "The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales."

--Claude Hopkins, "Scientific Advertising"

Rule #5: "People love to be sold."

--Franklin Watts, book publisher

Last Sunday, only one Super Bowl ad followed those rules.

As for the other advertisers--with $130 million going to CBS and another $70 million spent on production--the entire exercise was a $200 million circle jerk with a bunch of big agencies blowing their clients' money to show off to each other how clever they could be.

What flashes through my head is Monte Woolley's opening line in the George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart screwball comedy of 1939, "The Man Who Came to Dinner:"

"I may vomit!"

A Sampling of the Critiques

Two spots for Sierra Mist, sold by the Pepsi-Cola division of PepsiCo, were not as funny as those from the game last year. A third commercial, for Sierra Mist Free, hit the jackpot with a punch line that, well, came up short, as in the abbreviated shorts worn by the comedian Jim Gaffigan. Agency: BBDO Worldwide, part of Omnicom.

--Stuart Elliott, The New York Times

"Funny" is not the point. What was the return on investment (ROI)?

Anheuser-Busch Cos., in particular, produced a series of ads that resonated among a group of ad executives and consumers who talked with The Wall Street Journal after seeing the Super Bowl ads. Among the most popular was a Bud Light spot, crafted by Omnicom Group Inc.'s DDB, showing a string of men slapping each other. The ad was "one of the favorites of the game," says Greg Yeadon, a 28-year-old student at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Ill., who was watching the game with a group of 36 students and faculty.

--Suzanne Vranica, The Wall Street Journal

It doesn't matter if these ads "resonated among a group of ad executives." What was the ROI?

A robot in a GM assembly plant drops a screw. As a result, he's fired. He tries to make do with menial jobs, but he remains miserable. In the end, he jumps off a bridge. Thoughts: Haven't a lot of actual human auto workers been laid off lately? Are they meant to laugh when, at the end of the ad, the robot wakes up to realize this was just a bad dream, and that he still has his job so he doesn't need to commit suicide after all? Whew, thank goodness things worked out for you, robot!

--Seth Stevenson, Slate.com

GM loses $1,227 on every car it sells. No ROI is possible, even if it could be measured.

Unlike most Super Bowls, this year the game, in which the Colts trampled the Bears, 29-17, in a driving rain in Miami, may have been more fun to watch than the ads. Because who doesn't like watching beefy men slipping and sliding on a drenched football field while fumbling a slippery pigskin ball. Really, the NFL should start greasing footballs on dry days. Meanwhile, instead of pushing the envelope, the 20 or so advertisers who ponied up northward of $2.6 million per 30 secs of Super Bowl airtime played it safe.

--Lisa de Moraes, The Washington Post

Playing it safe is perfectly okay, depending on the ROI.

King crabs mistake a Bud cooler for a god in their own image. Cute. Wedding guests bribe an auctioneer to officiate, so the drinking can sooner begin. Cute. A wife objects to picking up a sketchy hitchhiker. "But he's got Bud Light," hubby says. She says: " O and an ax!" Sick. In a cute way.

--Bob Garfield, AdAge.com

What was the ROI on these "cute" ads?

Sales Genie--The Only Super Bowl Ad With a Chance of Making Money

When InfoUSA--one of the world's premier list compilers--announced that it would be running an ad for its Sales Genie lead generation service on the Super Bowl telecast, it generated buzz in the direct marketing community.

Why would a relatively small business-to-business list company opt for the most expensive buy in television--$2.6 million for 30 seconds plus some add-on cash for pre-and post-show ads. After all, this is a party for the biggest consumer advertisers in the world and their hotshot agencies. Does it make sense? Or is it nuts.

It makes sense only if an offer is made. No offer, no response.

"The right offer should be so attractive," wrote Claude Hopkins, "that only a lunatic would say no."

You can do the arithmetic on a cocktail napkin.

Super Bowl XLI was watched by 93 million viewers--the third largest audience in the history of television.

If you can make a powerful free offer to 93 million people and two out of every thousand viewers respond, you have a list of 186,000 responders, for which you have spent $2.6 million--or roughly $14 a lead.

With a B-to-B ad, only a relatively small segment of the total viewership are candidates.

Seth Sutel of the Associated Press wrote, "Vin Gupta, the founder and CEO of infoUSA said the Super Bowl represented a key chance to reach the 20 million sales people and 10 million small-business owners to which his company markets its services."

"If you're trying to reach 30 million potential clients, the Super Bowl is the best way to reach them," Gupta said. "Plus it gives you instant credibility."

Gupta's team created a thoroughly professional, 30-second commercial with a powerful offer--100 free sales leads. Only a lunatic would say no.

My bet is that Gupta's estimate of a 30 million universe is high, but let's go with it. If just three out of every thousand of those 30 million prospects responded with an order for 100 free leads, Sales Genie has instantly added 60,000 hot prospects to its file. If InfoUSA spent roughly $3 million for the three ads and got 90,000 leads, that is $33.33 per prospect.

But these are more than prospects. They are actual users of the service--trial customers. If Sales Genie's service is good--and the leads work--these folks will be back for more on a paying basis.

The AdAge Review of the SalesGenie.com Spot

Slick Brian Williams-look-alike sales stud has hot babe, hot car, low handicap, envious colleagues and the boss's notice--thanks to the leads generated by InfoUSA's Salesgenie subscription service. This spot is so monumentally brainless and amateurish it actually attracts attention--i.e., is this really a Super Bowl ad??? No problem. The "Glengarry Glen Ross" crowd won't downgrade for insipidness.

--Bob Garfield

In my book, Bob Garfield is just one more in a long line of self-styled "experts" that critiqued the Super Bowl ads and don't have a clue about how advertising works.

You can view the Sales Genie spot for yourself at www.salesgenie.com.

www.SalesGenie.com

While you are at it, savor this landing page as a marketing masterpiece that touches all bases:

(a) Immediately references the Super Bowl Offer and shows you how to get started quickly and easily. No stumbling around a generic home page and trying to remember why you are there.

(a) An offer to play the Super Bowl commercial on your computer screen.

(a) "No credit card required."

(a) "We respect your privacy."

(a) Subscription offer at big savings--$180 a month instead of the regular $400 a month.

(a) "Can't afford $180 per month? Try our "lite" version for $90 per month."

(a) "Satisfaction Guaranteed!"

(a) Testimonials from happy customers.

(a) Forward to a friend--a classic "viral marketing" technique to extend the reach of the original effort.

(a) Involvement devices that include "Send us your 2008 Super Bowl commercial idea" and "Enter for a chance to win Super Bowl Tickets."

(a) "Sales Genie[TM] is a service of infoUSA[R] a $600 million company on NASDAQ (IUSA). Over four million businesses use our sales leads to grow their business every day."

(a) Plus a series of promises, benefits and features

No other Super Bowl commercial came close to following the rules--either with the offer or the follow-up.

That is why to this direct marketer, the Sales Genie ad is the only one that made sense.

What Has Happened (So Far)

InfoUSA is very happy. As of yesterday, they have more than 18,000 registrations and many new, happy customers. In addition, since the Super Bowl ad, the number of daily unique visitors to the Web site has more than tripled.

If the average lifetime value of these 18,000 new customers is $1000--a conservative estimate in the business arena--this means revenue of $18 million--not bad for a $3 million investment in Super Bowl Advertising.

What's more, this is a highly profitable business. Instead of shipping merchandise, InfoUSA sends out bits of electricity over the Internet and, once in a while, some pressure sensitive labels. It warehouses nothing, picks, packs and ships nothing, takes no returns, has no postage or freight charges.

In short, this is what real-world advertising is all about.

My advice to the other Super Bowl advertisers: Tell your agency brats to play their little creative games on Second Life and spend their time figuring out how to bring your company some profitable business in the real world.

Otherwise you will find an agency that can.

(Reprinted in full with permission)

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About infoUSA

infoUSA (www.infoUSA.com), founded in 1972, is the leading provider of business and consumer databases for sales leads & mailing lists, database marketing services, data processing services and sales and marketing solutions. Content is the essential ingredient in every marketing program, and infoUSA has the most comprehensive data in the industry, and is the only company to own 12 proprietary databases under one roof. The infoUSA database powers the directory services of the top Internet traffic-generating sites. Nearly 4 million customers use infoUSA's products and services to find new customers, grow their sales, and for other direct marketing, telemarketing, customer analysis and credit reference purposes. infoUSA headquarters are located at 5711 S. 86th Circle, Omaha, NE 68127 and can be contacted at [phone]. To know more about Sales Leads, click www.infousa.com. To get a 7-day free trial and 100 free sales leads, click www.salesgenie.com.

Statements in this announcement other than historical data and information constitute forward looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those stated or implied by such forward-looking statements. The potential risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, recent changes in senior management, the successful integration of recent and future acquisitions, fluctuations in operating results, failure to successfully carry out our Internet strategy or to grow our Internet revenue, effects of leverage, changes in technology and increased competition. More information about potential factors that could affect the company's business and financial results is included in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.