What a come down

I’ve just had the most recent edition of Yellow Pages left at my doorstep and I almost stepped over it.

The photo shows this edition. Its physical dimensions are substantially reduced (it’s now slightly smaller than A4 size) but you can’t gauge from the photo how thick it is. And boy has it been on a diet!

Well let me break the sorry news to you… it’s about 300 odd pages of Yellow Pages advertisements and a similar number of pages in the business directory.

Gee, what a come down!

It only seems like a few years ago that the Yellow Pages was two volumes of around 2000 pages each. And every advertiser was busting to outdo their competitors.

And there was only one way you could do it… “My way or the highway” where “My way” was the no questions asked or entertained Yellow Pages way. You had to do your advert their way and that was that.

Now, of course, Yellow Pages been largely replaced by the myriad of search engines on the net.

But (and it’s in bold because it’s a big ‘but’) a cautionary word. Many of us learnt how to do very, very effective Yellow Pages advertisements to ensure that they stood out from the crowd and worked their backsides off.

All of the techniques we used then now apply to what you do digitally.

Remember, when people went to the Yellow Pages they were looking for a solution to their problems. They wanted to find a business who appeared to provide those solutions and gave strong reasons to do business with them.

And when they search the net nowadays aren’t they looking for exactly the same thing?

In another article I’ll remind you of some of that Yellow Pages gold.

Out of interest, here’s an article from The Age of a few years ago with more of the Yellow Pages story.

You’ll also see that famous “I’m not happy Jan” TV commercial. If you’re old enough to remember it, it’ll bring tears to your eyes.