Yellow Pages is dead, long live search engines!
The day has finally arrived, Yellow Pages has declared that it’s all over. No more trailing through the “not so big yellow book” looking for “Fly Fishing, by J R Hartley” (that will be lost on anyone under 35). So, why is this a milestone in advertising history? Well put quite simply, at one point you had to be in Yellow Pages if you were a retail business, there was really no option. It was the business listing that everyone used and trusted. People used it like Google My Business or the main Google listing, before the days of the internet people had very few choices to get their business into every home in the locality. In its day, it provided an easy way to put your advert through every door. Personally, I have always hated it and generally I have always disliked the sales people, I am generalising, as over the many years I spent money with them I met a few that were brilliant. But that’s how it has always been with Yellow pages for most of the businesses I speak to. I used to call it the second business tax, because it was very hard not to advertise in it, and the bigger your business got the harder it became and you seemed to need larger adverts. I remember in the 90s pulling all our Yellow pages adverts and my customers phoning us to see if we had gone out of business, such was the power it once held. So, it’s the end of an era, but I for one say good riddance to it and no RIP from me.
Alex Russell
PS My advice for the last issues remains the same as the last 5 years, don’t bother advertising with them.