I ran across an article today detailing some responses to the elimination of the Ad Agencies list by the Houston Business Journal in '08. Reading this article: http://www.onlyinhouston.org/en/art/2060/ you can see this really made some waves in the community. It appears that many advertising agencies were disheartened by the decision to forego the list that year ... I like this article because it presents two sides of a complex issue.
First, you have a blogger representing an ad agency in Houston, voicing his disapproval of this decision by Houston Business Journal to eliminate the Ad Agencies list.
Second, you have a response by someone defending the journal explaining the decision to eliminate the list - i.e. suspicions that ad agencies were inflating their billings in order to rank higher on the list leading to discussions about how to provide a more objective ranking criteria that didn't conclude or take action in time.
What I notice about this article, above all, is the power of the book of lists in its local context. No business anywhere, to my knowledge, is complaining about being left out of a national executive contacts database. But when companies get left off of the lists, they notice. Book of lists data carries a certain energy, a certain public investment, that you rarely find. Businesses engage with these lists in a profound way. This is a HUGE aspect of what separates book of list data from nationally aggregated data traditionally subscribed to as sales leads. As business publishers begin to tap into the potential energy contained in this data, I think we are going to see something truly remarkable.
