Yellow Pages Face High-Tech Challenge Printed Directories Still Popular Despite New Competition

“Never try to remember a telephone number; it’s all right if you do remember it, but to try to remember is to begin to guess. If you have the least doubt about it, look it up and thus save time and trouble.”

-May 1909 telephone directory

Business always comes down to numbers. In the case of the Yellow Pages, it’s $10 billion worth of numbers.

That’s how much advertisers spent last year to appear in the Yellow Pages. The lure is simple: 65 percent of the times that a consumer consults the Yellow Pages, a purchase results, according to the National Yellow Pages Monitor, an independent research company.

Although deregulation of the telecommunications industry has spawned competition, the Baby Bells and General Telephone get 85 percent of the Yellow Pages market nationally. Niche players divvy up the rest.

Today’s Yellow Pages are descendants of 18th-century city directories, which existed long before Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876. One such directory, covering Boston and dated 1785, carried an advertisement for a silversmith named Paul Revere.

In 1907, to meet the need for repairs generated by the 1906 San Francisco quake, Pacific Bell published its first directory with paid advertisements and craftsmen listed by trade.

In 1916, studies by Bell Labs showed ads on yellow paper could be read more easily, and the Yellow Pages were officially born.

Today, more than 250 companies put out roughly 6,000 Yellow Pages directories, says Larry Small, vice president of marketing services for the Yellow Pages Publishers Association, a trade association. For Pacific Bell, the $9 billion subsidiary of Pacific Telesis, the Yellow Pages brought in $1 billion in revenues last year.

Its Yellow Pages have 4,456 classifications this year.

A staff of three decides which company is listed where. This job includes evaluating roughly 600 requests by advertisers each year to establish new categories.

Think your job is hard? The Yellow Pages’ manager of headings, Janet Isely, had to disappoint Santa Claus as part of her job.

When a seasonal St. Nick sought to be listed under Santa Claus last year, he was rejected. Pacific Bell felt the best place for a Santa was under the Entertainers category, says Isely.

Generally, Pacific Bell approves 85 or so of the requests for new categories and rejects the rest. When Pacific Bell adds headings, it generates additional revenue but risks making the Yellow Pages cumbersome to use.

Among those categories proposed but turned down last year were bird sitting, dreams, face painting, horse therapy and puzzles. Isely and her staff are constantly on alert for “heading jumping.” That’s when an advertiser seeks a new heading to move closer to the front of the book, where people are more likely to start looking.

While Pacific Bell is one of the biggest players in the game, smaller, niche players survive by serving communities that the major companies don’t. They might be geographic or ethnic

In California, for example, waves of immigration have fueled demand for directories in Spanish, Chinese, Armenian, Vietnamese and Korean.

The billions spent last year on Yellow Pages ads also spawned a race by companies large and small to develop on-line telephone directories.

No one is predicting the demise of the printed Yellow Pages, but some of the money spent there will migrate to electronic directories, says John Joseph, president of Ketchum Directory Advertising, which places ads in Yellow Pages nationwide for clients such as Allstate Insurance. “Because of the convenience, the printed Yellow Pages will never go away,” he says.

The development of electronic Yellow Pages hinges on how long it takes consumers to become comfortable with that medium.

Remember, there was a time when the telephone was considered an innovation. Consider these directions in the November 1909 Santa Clara County (Calif.) directory:

“HOW TO ANSWER A TELEPHONE CALL - Remove the hand telephone from the hook and say, ‘Here is Main 297’ (or whatever your number may be.) The party calling should say, ‘This is Main 298’ (or whatever the number may be). Much friction and avoidance will be avoided if this simple plan is carried out.”