MediaPost: Yellow Pages Do Some Talking, Hope National Ad Fingers Start Walking
Directory advertising, the term of art for yellow pages listings, even sounds like an online medium. Unfortunately, the similarities don’t end there. Both types of media are considered absolute musts for specific categories of advertisers. Both do a brisker business than outdoor or radio, or even cable television. The creative options leave a lot to be desired. The placements are highly targeted. But, for the most part, national marketers shun both.
Much like the online media, for every dollar spent on directory advertising by its core market (in this case, local businesses) only 16 cents gets spent by national companies. It’s a medium that can prove its return on investment very accurately, yet the big brands – even the ones conducting direct marketing – shun yellow pages.
The big difference between it and online seems to be the funny thing that happened to Internet media in 1997. For a period of about three years, it became cool. It had been previously relegated to the dusty corners of media research departments, mulled over by tweedy geeks or account executives bored by the brand management process of slinging safe "creative" for Midwestern MBA graduates. And, now, as online advertising revives, it awakes to find itself in largely the same market position directory advertising has been in for a few decades. The fastest growing category of online advertising is search engine marketing, a computerized version of yellow pages functionality.
This is not the image online advertising people want to project. Sure, yellow pages advertising continues to grow (at least for now, before it gets eaten up by online), but it carries with it a completely different culture that does not lend itself to impressing the nationals that irrationally hold back media dollars. Directory advertising firms have seedy offices. You will find them five miles outside of the city, in the space between brownfields and the elevated tracks. They are generally run by older, very entrepreneurial, usually very local people, the sort that don’t fit in quite as well with the up-and-comer crowd of clients looking to preen in front of agencies at $24 entrée bistros.
And, like it or not, they are coming. As search engine marketing rockets from around one in 15 online dollars last year to one in 6 online dollars this year, the online media people have started to eat the yellow pages lunch. They sit at the same table, viewed in the same glance by those nationals on their way to pour money down broadcast drains.
